Jason Thomas and Gerhard Brueckl have both blogged on the subject of storing images as text inside a Power BI dataset:

http://sqljason.com/2018/01/embedding-images-in-power-bi-using-base64.html

https://blog.gbrueckl.at/2018/01/storing-images-powerbi-analysis-services-data-models/

Since they wrote those posts, however, Power BI has added the ability to set the Data Category property on measures as well as columns in tables. This means it is now possible to have the output of a DAX measure displayed as an image in a Power BI report and this in turn opens up a lot of new possibilities – including the ability to work around the maximum size of a text value that can be loaded into Power BI (see my previous blog post for more details) and therefore work with larger images.

Here’s a rather lovely picture of a rose:

The original is about 2.1MB; I have a folder on my PC where different versions of this picture, saved at different percentages of the original size, are stored:

Using the technique that Gerhard wrote about, where the pictures can be stored as text in a single cell in a Power BI dataset and then displayed (in this case I’m using the Image by CloudScope custom visual) some truncation of the image occurs even with the smallest files because of the 32766 character limit on the length of a text value that can be loaded into Power BI. Here’s what you see when you display the version of the picture that is 20% of the original size, a file of only 113KB:

To work around this, what you need to do is to split the text representation of the image up into multiple smaller text values stored across multiple rows, each of which is less than the 32766 character limit, and then reassemble them in a DAX measure after the data has been loaded.

Splitting the text up in M is actually not that hard, but it is hard to do efficiently. Here’s an example of an M query that reads all the data from all of the files in the folder above and returns a table:

let
    //Get list of files in folder
    Source = Folder.Files("C:\Users\Chris\Documents\PQ Pics"),
    //Remove unnecessary columns
    RemoveOtherColumns = Table.SelectColumns(Source,{"Content", "Name"}),
    //Creates Splitter function
    SplitTextFunction = Splitter.SplitTextByRepeatedLengths(30000),
    //Converts table of files to list
    ListInput = Table.ToRows(RemoveOtherColumns),
    //Function to convert binary of photo to multiple
    //text values
    ConvertOneFile = (InputRow as list) =>
        let
            BinaryIn = InputRow{0},
            FileName = InputRow{1},
            BinaryText = Binary.ToText(BinaryIn, BinaryEncoding.Base64),
            SplitUpText = SplitTextFunction(BinaryText),
            AddFileName = List.Transform(SplitUpText, each {FileName,_})
        in
            AddFileName,
    //Loops over all photos and calls the above function
    ConvertAllFiles = List.Transform(ListInput, each ConvertOneFile(_)),
    //Combines lists together
    CombineLists = List.Combine(ConvertAllFiles),
    //Converts results to table
    ToTable = #table(type table[Name=text,Pic=text],CombineLists),
    //Adds index column to output table
    AddIndexColumn = Table.AddIndexColumn(ToTable, "Index", 0, 1)
in
    AddIndexColumn

In my next post I’ll show you my original version of this query, explain why it was slow, and try to explain how the version above works and why it is much faster.

Here’s what the query above returns:

The Pic column contains the split text values, each of which are less than the 32766 character limit, so when this table is loaded into Power BI no truncation occurs. The index column is necessary because without it we won’t be able to recombine all the split values in the correct order.

The only thing left to do is to create a measure that uses the DAX ConcatenateX() function to concatenate all of the pieces of text back into a single value, like so:

Display Image = 
IF(
    HASONEVALUE('PQ Pics'[Name]),
    "data:image/jpeg;base64, " & 
    CONCATENATEX(
        'PQ Pics', 
        'PQ Pics'[Pic],
        ,
        'PQ Pics'[Index],
        ASC)
        )

…set the data category of this measure to be “Image URL”:

…and then display the value of the image in a report:

Unfortunately, as I also mentioned in my previous post, most DAX functions (and that includes ConcatenateX()) have a limit of around 2.1 million characters so the original 2.1MB file still can’t be displayed, alas:

However, I do think this technique will be useful because it allows you to work with much larger pictures than before.

It can also be useful in other situations too. I recently came across a great new custom visual called PDF Viewer that can display PDF files stored in text form in a Power BI report:

The example file for this visual shows how a large PDF file can be split across two columns in a table; the technique I describe here is a more practical solution to this problem.

What is the maximum length of a text value in Power BI? It turns out that this is a more complex question than you might think!

The maximum length of a text value that the Power Query engine can load into a single cell in a table in a dataset is 32766 characters – any more than that and the text will be silently truncated. However, if you’re working with text inside the Power Query engine you’ll find that you can work with much longer text values.  To illustrate this, consider the following M query:

let
    Source = 
        #table(
            type table[charcount = number],
            {
                {1},
                {10000},
                {30000},
                {40000}
                }
                ),
    #"Added Custom" = 
        Table.AddColumn(
            Source, 
            "LongText", 
            each Text.Repeat("1", [charcount]),
            type text
            ),
    #"Inserted Text Length" = 
        Table.AddColumn(
            #"Added Custom", 
            "Length", 
            each Text.Length([LongText]), 
            Int64.Type
            )
in
    #"Inserted Text Length"

It creates a table with four rows and three columns. The first column contains the numbers 1, 10000, 30000 and 40000; the second column contains the character “1” repeated the number of times given in the first column; the third column returns the length of the text in the second column using the Text.Length() M function. Here’s the output in the Power Query Editor, which is pretty much as you’d expect:

I’m not sure if there is a maximum length for text values in M; I experimented with adding an extra row to the table above with a 900,000,000 character text value and Text.Length() was able to return the correct value, albeit after a bit of a wait.

Load the table above into your Power BI dataset though, and add a DAX calculated column with the following expression:

DAX Length = LEN('LengthsDemo'[LongText])

…and you can see in the Data pane of the main Power BI Desktop window that the long text value in the last row has been truncated to 32766 characters:

Once you’ve loaded your data into Power BI the documentation says that the maximum length of a text value is “268,435,456 Unicode characters (256 mega characters) or 536,870,912 bytes”. The bad news is that many DAX functions such as ConcatenateX() put a limit on the length of the text values that they can work with at around 2.1 million characters (thank you Jeffrey Wang for providing this information – it isn’t documented anywhere at the moment). If you exceed this limit you’ll get the following error:

Function ‘PLACEHOLDER’ encountered a Text that exceeds the maximum allowable length.

In summary, then, there are two different practical limits on the maximum length of a text value in Power BI: the 32766 character limit on text being loaded into Power BI, and the 2.1 million character limit in DAX functions. The first of these can be worked around with some clever M – you need to split long text values up into multiple smaller values stored in different columns or rows – but even if you do this, the second limit may stop you recreating the original value after the data has been loaded.

Why is this useful or important? How can you split text values up in M in the most efficient way? I’ll come to that in my next two posts!