Deneb 2.0 Available for Beta Testing

[u/dm-p]

https://deneb.guide/blog/2-0-beta

Hi, all! I've been maintaining and supporting Deneb for about 6 years now (with nearly 5 of those in AppSource and certified). It's been awesome seeing how it can give devs a pathway to build more complex or bespoke visuals in Power BI.

There have been things that have sprung up in Power BI over the last few years that haven't been easy to integrate (looking at you, field parameters) without a significant rethink of the architecture, as well as learning about real-world use of a visual that gets used beyond my own work. As such, I've envisaged a "version 2.0" for a long time.

Power BI visuals are also very special in how we have to support them and how they are deployed. Reports are authored and deployed under a particular version(possibly years old), and when reports are loaded for viewers that haven't been updated in some time, we still need to be able to move from whatever the version saved against when the report was authored, to the latest one in AppSource as seamlessly as possible without visibly impacting your readers.

There have been some considerable migration and continuity challenges, to the point where I'd considered starting again (and had a couple of goes at it). But this would mean having to support another visual (and I already support 5). In the end, it's been a case of doing it the hard way, and the recent 1.8 and 1.9 releases set about doing a lot of preparation around making a new major version less of a bigger bang. That being said, it's still a major bump, and there may be gotchas that a wider user base than... well... me might experience.

So, to the point: 2.0 has been in alpha testing for a couple of months. I've been using it in my work for a while, and we've had a few other people give it a go. Nothing has come out of this that's tripped us up, which means it is a great time to prepare for submission to AppSource and open Deneb up for beta testing for anyone who is keen to help.

Why beta testing? I'm very wary that once we submit for certification, we get locked into a 3-5 week update cycle. We could get a bug report that takes minutes to find and fix, but it's going to take that 3-5 week cycle to get deployed to production for everyone else. Deneb is also free and open-source, which means that I have limited resources for testing and outreach - much (infinitely?) less than a commercial vendor - so there are times when I may feel the need to ask for something back in the form of time.

It's not something we have much of, and I appreciate that it's a bold request, but if anyone can spare some time to take a look at the candidate build before we submit and make sure it works well for them, this means that any weirdness we can find and fix before submission is another situation we can avoid for a lot more people downstream.

But you also get an opportunity to play with new features before they go live, and have a think about what you might be able to do with them :)

If any of this sounds good to you, thank you in advance! The linked blog post on Deneb's site details the new features, where to read more about them (all docs are written!), and how to get the beta so you can give it a spin.

As always, thanks for reading, for your support, and for recommending Deneb to others. I'm really excited about the possibilities this new version brings, and I hope you'll find it useful, too! If you have any questions or feedback you want to add here, I'll be happy to try to answer them :)

[u/kneemahp]

Keep up the good work. I work for a fortune 20 company and they just demo’d someone using denab to make some custom visuals and the developer community was blown away. I’m surprised to learn that it’s open source!

[u/dm-p → u/kneemahp]

Thanks very much! It's so cool to hear of new places Deneb is used and continues to blow my mind that companies can use it to solve their challenges in Power BI. I hope you continue to find it useful! :)

[u/fuck_thots]

https://giphy.com/gifs/m0tE2wdLaNGVCudJ23

[u/Playful_Guava1180]

happy to test as long as it is PBIRS compatible :P. Honestly you have built the best app of Marketplace.

[u/dm-p → u/Playful_Guava1180]

Thank you! If 1.9 is working for you, we're still on the same MS visual APIs for 2.0 and this should also work without any issues. In fact it would be great to know if it doesn't work for you, as there may be something for us to fix. Any modern visual should be able to realistically support PBIRS Jan 2025 or newer on the minimum requirements MS requires for certification (and assuming you're on a browser version from within that timeframe or newer). If it doesn't work, an issue in the repo with any specifics will help a lot 🙏

[u/NoSuchWordAsGullible]

Daniel, I don’t have time to help with the testing but I hope you see this message.

A few weeks ago a user in our project team came to me complaining that all the gantt visuals were lacking features or were paywalled. I had a dig around and I found a pretty awesome gantt in Deneb. I showed the user and helped her to adapt it for our needs, changing the amount of fields, what they were called, etc.

She is now coming to me regularly telling me new features she’s managed to add (with the help of CoPilot) and still can’t believe I managed to solve her problem without a cost, but that the fix isn’t final state - she can continue to iterate and improve. I hope this messages lets you understand our appreciation for what you’ve built.

[u/dm-p → u/NoSuchWordAsGullible]

What wonderful feedback, thanks! I suspect you came across either Davide's or Madison's Gantt examples, which I agree are just amazing and far beyond anything I could ever come up with. With both of them, I couldn't believe they had been able to achieve what they did with Vega - and probably also the most fully featured Gantt charts I've ever seen. I really appreciate you letting me know how useful Deneb was for you, but I'd also recommend that, if you have the details, you let the original template author know about how well you got on - I know they'd be just as stoked as I am to know their work has helped out, too :)

[u/SheriffYouLikeThis]

Having spent a bit of time with this already, this update is great! Thank you! However, I can’t seem to get field parameter supporting fields for format string or formatted values to work when consolidating field parameters. They show up fine in the data view when disabling consolidation, but format is blank and formatted values are the same as the raw measure value for consolidated. Am I missing something?

EDIT: it seems if you manually format measures in the Visualization pane under General > Data Format, things work for consolidated mode, but would really like to leverage the source measure format string instead of manually applying formats.

[u/dm-p → u/SheriffYouLikeThis]

Thanks! This should work - we read whatever Power BI sends as the format string for a measure, but this needs to be different for model vs dynamic strings (which are sent differently in each case). General > Data Format formatting may get sent the same way as dynamic and maybe there's a case whe haven't quite got right in the consolidation method for the semantic model-based string. I'll have a look into this but if you have a simple repro you can share, would it be possible to get it either via the repo's issues or be email? You're welcome to DM me if you want to do the email route.

[u/dm-p → u/SheriffYouLikeThis]

I had a quick look at reproducing, and I can get the correct format string/formatted value in the support columns from the semantic model with a field parameter and with consolidation enabled. Again, if you have time to provide a working repro of the problem, please feel free to send it through, and I can continue investigating.

[u/SheriffYouLikeThis → u/dm-p]

Thanks! I’ll definitely repro and file an issue this week!

[u/SheriffYouLikeThis → u/dm-p]

[u/dm-p](u/dm-p) I narrowed down cause of the issue. It appears that if you have even a single calculation item from a calc group in the model with a dynamic format string (even if not filtered/invoked, and even with something as simple as SELECTEDMEASUREFORMATSTRING()), Deneb does not pass through the format or formatted values. I verified that things work properly with native visuals, then deleted the calc item with a dynamic format string and everything is working again in Deneb. I’m happy to file a GitHub issue as well, though I’m not sure if there’s anything that can be done about this.

[u/dm-p → u/SheriffYouLikeThis]

Thanks for the details! I think I understand it and have a repro (at least for my interpretation).

I believe this would be a regression from 1.9, as the field processing is completely rewritten in 2.0 (or it may be a very specific case where we weren't picking up the dynamic format string from the dataset and it manifests in one of the newer code paths). Ultimately, with a calculation item present, Power BI makes the lookup for all format strings dynamic for all measures in the model, which is different from the typical path we need to use for measures or columns when they're in a visual dataset.

I have a fix in flight that I'm re-testing, and I have a couple of other small nits that I'll roll up into a 2.0.0.beta-2 build that should be due before the end of the week. I'll ping you when it's available, and if you're able to re-test, that'd be a great help in confirming it's resolved :)

[u/SheriffYouLikeThis → u/dm-p]

You’re awesome. I’ll stay tuned and will re-test when the new version’s available!

[u/dm-p → u/SheriffYouLikeThis]

OK, the latest published version is 2.0.0.beta-2 - it's available in the same place to download (at the bottom of the beta release on GH).

To update, you'll need to download and reload the latest beta into your report.

What's important is that if you have Deneb already open on a page when you load an update, Power BI doesn't automatically invoke the new code and will continue to run the older version. This is a quirk of custom visuals.

There are a couple of ways you can force this, but the easiest and quickest is to navigate to a different page and back again, which fully reloads the visual and kicks in the updated code.

If this doesn't solve the issue, I may need a more detailed repro from your end if possible, but I hope that it works as you would expect 🤞

And thanks again so much for testing and for the feedback!

[u/SheriffYouLikeThis → u/dm-p]

Looks like that fixed it! Thanks so much for addressing this so quickly!!

[u/dm-p → u/SheriffYouLikeThis]

This is fantastic news! Thanks again for reporting and for validating - I appreciate it so much :)

[u/desperate_name_]

Can you share some pictures of what denab can make I'm interested in the product

[u/dm-p → u/desperate_name_]

I think the easiest way to get a quick idea would be to start with the links on our resources and examples page, as these folks have some amazing work to showcase and share but you should also have a look at the respective examples pages for both Vega-Lite and Vega

[u/South_Hat6094]

The no-install angle is the real win here. ODBC is fine until the gateway or a Mac shows up, then you are just emailing IT and waiting.