We are happy to announce that we have a new version of Tabular Editor 3 out. This will be the last update of Tabular Editor 3 in 2023. We wish all our customers a happy holiday season and a peaceful and prosperous new year!

Last month we brought out the highest voted for feature in our community poll, but the vote was so close that we decided to bring the other two features to Tabular Editor as well!

Tabular Editor 3.13.0 Highlights

Improvements
Bug Fixes
- Calculate Refresh not Showing

If you just can’t wait, do head on over to downloads to get the release.

Improvements

We’ve made several improvements in the December release and we are highlighting the most important ones below.

See all the featured improvements demoed here

Relationships Highlighting

Two significant improvements to how relationships are displayed has arrived in Tabular Editor 3.13.0

The first improvement is that relationships connected to the selected table or column are highlighted in the TOM Explorer. This is a UI improvement that aims to make it easier to understand how your model’s relationships are set up. In combination with the model diagram Tabular Editor now gives you several methods to work with your model.

Thank you to @MarioMue13 for first suggesting this improvement on our GitHub forum. This was the third place runner up in our October feature poll, but with 25 % of the votes, it was still a popular feature that we decided to prioritize.

The setting can be disabled under Tools > Preferences > TOM Explorer

Figure 1: Highlighting relationships connected to a table, the same functionality also exists on columns.

The second relationship improvement is to be able to view relatationships dependencies on the column and this was suggested by @edhans in the same thread as the highlight suggestion above.

The ‘Show Dependencies’ dialog box will now, when used on a column, show relationships that the column is involved in.

Figure2: Show Dependencies dialog with Relationship starting from this column

Unprocessed Tables Alert

Tabular Editor will now show warnings in the ‘Messages’ window when an object is in an unprocessed state. This can be when a partition has not been processed or a calculated table or column has not been calculated in the model, thus leaving the model in a state where you may encounter errors when attempting to run a DAX query. The warning will also show for calculation groups in all model types including Direct Lake models.

Figure 3: Messages view showing warnings for unprocessed objects, in this case a calculated column and two tables

IsAvaliableInMDX Warning

The runner up in our October feature poll was to receive a warning when a column that has the TOM property IsAvaliableInMDX set to false is used as a sort by column elsewhere in the model. IsAvaliableInMDX is often disabled in an attempt to minimize the memory footprint of a model and should in general be set on all columns that are not used as slicers or filters in a report. The BPA rule set maintained by Microsoft even has a handy rule to remind you to disable this property.

The problem this new warning alerts you to, is if you use a column that has IsAvailableInMDX set to false as a “Sort by Column” for another column, the model will most likely fail to deploy. This can easily lead to some confusion as to why a model cannot be deployed, as the error messages returned from the Analysis Services engine are not always helpful.

Tabular Editor 3 therefore now shows a warning if this issue occurs, so that it may be fixed before any attempt to deploy the model is made.

Storage Mode in Title Bar

A small but nifty little update we have included in Tabular Editor 3.13.0 is that the ‘Title Bar’ will now show a text for which type of storage mode the semantic model is in.

Figure 4: Title bar show the semantic model type

So, for example the picture above shows that the SpacePartstest dataset is in import mode. The possible options that the title bar can show are Import, DirectQuery, Composite (i.e. a mix of tables in Import, DirectQuery and Dual mode) or Direct Lake mode.

TMDL Update

The TMLD preview library has been updated to the newest version which introduces a new “database.tmdl” file that contains new metadata on the database level such as database name, compatibility level and mode.

NOTE

TMLD is still in preview and should not be used in production, as you may be impacted by breaking changes between updates.

TIP

If you encounter any issues opening a model that was saved as TMDL with an earlier version of Tabular Editor, a possible fix is to open the model from TMDL using the same earlier version of Tabular Editor, save it as a Model.bim file, and then use the latest version of Tabular Editor to open the Model.bim file and save it back to the TMDL format.

Bug Fixes

We have made multiple bug fixes in 3.13.0; please see our release notes for full details.

Calculate Refresh not Showing

There was a regression in 3.12.0, where the “Refresh > Calculate” option would not be available for regular data tables. This has now been fixed as well (since data tables may contain calculated columns, which necessitates the ability to perform a calculate refresh on the table).

If you have any feedback or experience any bugs please reach out in our community forum. We look forward to hearing from you

Tabular Editor 3: December 2023 Release