Refreshing Hidden Tables In Power BI Semantic Models With Fabric Data Pipelines

Following on from my recent post about refreshing semantic models with Fabric Data Pipelines and the semantic model refresh activity, a few people asked me how to refresh hidden tables because they are not displayed in the Pipeline configuration UI. I got the answer from my colleague Alex Powers (aka reddit celebrity u/itsnotaboutthecell) who kindly allowed me to blog about it.

To demonstrate how to do this, I created a semantic model with two tables: one visible, called VisibleTable, and one hidden, calledHiddenTable.

I then published the semantic model, created a Data Pipeline and added a semantic model refresh activity; selected the connection, workspace and semantic model; waited for the Table(s) dropdown to populate (yes I know it’s slow, we’re working on it):

…and then, when it loaded, noted that only the visible table was shown in the dropdown:

I didn’t select anything and instead clicked “Add dynamic content” to use an expression to select the table instead:

Then in the Pipeline expression builder I entered the following:

@json('
    [
        {
            "table":"HiddenTable"
        }
    ]
')

Having done this I ran the Pipeline and just the hidden table was refreshed. Easy!

The expression needs to be a JSON array of table and partition names. Here’s an example showing how to refresh the table called HiddenTable and the sole partition of the table called VisibleTable (which also happens to be called VisibleTable) in the same refresh:

@json('
    [
        {
            "table":"HiddenTable"
        },
        {
            "table": "VisibleTable",
            "partition": "VisibleTable"
        }
    ]
')

It’s useful to know how to construct the expression even if you don’t need to refresh hidden tables – for example, you might want to dynamically generate the list of tables or partitions to refresh with an expression.