Today I’ll show you a very useful technique how to deal with a JSON record that contains a wild mixture of different elements like this:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
If you click on one of the expandable elements, their content will be shown, but you’ll loose all the “surrounding” information (metadata) that is visible now. This is often an issue, regardless if you want to create multiple tables from it to build a star-schema or just need a handful of fields or a denormalized table. But with a little help from M, you’re good to go:
Table.FromRecords( { MyJsonRecord } )Will returns this:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
With this move, every expansion of one of the expandable elements will keep the existing data in place:
Create one big flat table
Simply expand one element after each other to create a denormalized table
Create star schema
For multiple tables, keep this query and reference it to create you (sub-)tables. Always keep the Id-column as the key (!) to combine all the tables in your data model later. (Provided you use this in a function for multiple entities/series)
Best is to play with it, so just past this code into the advanced editor:
If your JSON-record has a different structure with “just” header and data in different fields, this technique will be more suitable for you: http://www.thebiccountant.com/2016/04/23/universal-json-opener-for-quandl/
Enjoy & stay queryious 🙂
The post How to open a complex JSON record in Power BI and Power Query appeared first on The BIccountant.
