Recently I was creating a parameter in Power BI Desktop and had it configured something like this:

I didn’t bother to choose anything in the Default Value dropdown box, and when I looked at the code for the parameter in the Advanced Editor I saw this:

I was interested to know what the ellipsis symbol (three dots …) in the DefaultValue field in the record meant, and looking in the Language Reference I found that in M it can be used for two purposes: as an open record marker (maybe something for a future blog post) and, as in this case, as a quick way of returning an error. The language reference says that it is directly equivalent to the following expression, which returns a “Not Implemented” error:

But from what I can see, it actually returns a “Value was not specified” error instead. Here’s another example of how it can be used in a function definition, and what it returns:

It’s not something I think I’ll be using in my own code, but it’s good to know what it means!

When you’re writing your own M code you often find yourself needing to create a list containing a sequence of numbers or characters. Luckily the M language allows you to do this very easily when you are defining lists by using expressions in the format

{lowest_integer..highest_integer}

For example, imagine you want to create a list with all of the integers between 1 and 5. Instead of writing

{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}

You can write the following:

{1..5}

and it will return the same list:

You can also use this format in more complex list definitions, for example

{1..3, 5, 7..9}

Returns the list

{1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9}

When you’re using this technique you must always put the lowest integer first and the highest integer last; if you don’t do this you get an empty list. So, for example, the expression

{5..1}

Returns an empty list:

It’s also possible to use this technique to create lists of characters. For example, the expression:

{"a".."z"}

Returns a list containing all of the lowercase letters of the alphabet:

The first character in the expression has to have the lowest Unicode value and the second character has to have the highest Unicode value, and the sequence of characters returned is the list of all characters with Unicode values in that range. As a result, the expression

{"#".."%"}

Returns the list

{"#", "$", "%"}

And the expression

{"a".."Z"}

Returns an empty list because the Unicode value of “a” is greater than the Unicode value of “Z”.

This technique doesn’t work for decimal numbers, dates or other data types. If you want a sequence of values of these types you need to use functions list List.Dates() and List.Numbers().

Lists are, of course, used all over the place in M. Building on my recent post on using #table() to create tables with no data source, here’s one last example of using lists containing sequences to create a simple table with three columns and three rows:

#table({"A".."C"}, {{1..3}, {7..9}, {11..13}})

After my post earlier this week on creating current day/week/month/year reports in Power BI a few people asked me for a more detailed explanation of the way I was creating tables without using a data source in my M code. This is something I find myself doing quite a lot when I’m loading data with Power BI and Power Query, and while there are several ways of doing this I find that using the #table() intrinsic function is the most elegant option.

Let’s look at some examples. The following query returns a table with two columns (called “First Column” and “Second Column”) and two rows containing the values from 1 to 4:

#table({"First Column", "Second Column"}, {{1,2},{3,4}})

No data source is needed – this is a way of defining a table value in pure M code. The first parameter of the function takes a list of column names as text values; the second parameter is a list of lists, where each list in the list contains the values on each row in the table.

In the last example the columns in the table were of the data type Any (the ABC123 icon in each column header tells you this), which means that they can contain values of any data type including numbers, text, dates or even other tables. Here’s an example of this:

#table(
{"First Column", "Second Column"},
{
{1,"Hello"},
{#date(2016,1,1),3}
}
)

While this is flexible it’s not exactly practical: in almost all cases the Any data type is a bad choice for loading data, and you need to explicitly set the data type for each column. You can set data types for columns quite easily as a separate step, but it is also possible to set column data types using #table():

#table(
type table
[
#"Number Column"=number,
#"Text Column"=text,
#"Date Column"=date
],
{
{1,"Hello",#date(2016,1,1)},
{2,"World",#date(2017,12,12)}
}
)

In this example the first parameter is no longer a list of column names but a declaration of a table type that not only has column names in but also column types. You can see from the icons in the column headers in the screenshot above that the column called “Number Column” has a data type of number, “Text Column” has a data type of text, and “Date Column” has a data type of date.

Of course if you need a fixed table value in Power BI you could use the “Enter Data” button or, if you’re using Excel and Power Query you could create an Excel table and then use the Excel.CurrentWorkbook() function to load the contents of it; if you or your end users need to edit the values in your table easily then you should use one of these two options. On the other hand if you don’t want users to be able to edit the values in the table or, more likely, you are generating the contents of your table using functions that return lists (as in my previous post) then #table() is the way to go.

When you start writing M code for loading data in Power Query or Power BI, one of the first things you’ll do is open up the Advanced Editor for a query you’ve already built using the UI. When you do that you’ll see a very scary chunk of code (and at the time of writing there’s no intellisense or colour coding in the Advanced Editor, making it even more scary) and you’ll wonder how to make sense of it. The first step to doing so is to understand how let expressions work in M.

Each query that you create in Power BI Desktop or Power Query is a single expression that, when evaluated, returns a single value – and that single value is usually, but not always, a table that then gets loaded into the data model. To illustrate this, open up Power BI Desktop (the workflow is almost the same in Power Query), click the Edit Queries button to open the Query Editor window and then click New Source/Blank Query to create a new query.

Next, go to the View tab and click on the Advanced Editor button to open the Advanced Editor dialog:

You’ll notice that this doesn’t actually create a blank query at all, because there is some code visible in the Advanced Editor when you open it. Delete everything there and replace it with the following M expression:

Hit the Done button and the expression will be evaluated, and you’ll see that the query returns the text value “Hello World”:

Notice how the ABC icon next to the name of the Query – Query1 – indicates that the query returns a text value. Congratulations, you have written the infamous “Hello World” program in M!

You might now be wondering how the scary chunk of code you see in the Advanced Editor window for your real-world query could possibly be a single expression – but in fact it is. This is where let expressions come in: they allow you to break a single expression down into multiple parts. Open up the Advanced Editor again and enter the following expression:

Without knowing anything about M it’s not hard to guess that this bit of code returns the numeric value 21 (notice again that the 123 icon next to the name of the query indicates the data type of the value the query returns):

In the M language a let expression consists of two sections. After the let comes a list of variables, each of which has a name and an expression associated with it. In the previous example there are three variables: step1, step2 and step3. Variables can refer to other variables; here, step3 refers to both step1 and step2. Variables can be used to store values of any type: numbers, text, dates, or even more complex types like records, lists or tables; here, all three variables return numbers. The Query Editor is usually clever enough to display these variables as steps in your query and so displays then in the Applied Steps pane on the right-hand side of the screen:

The value that the let expression returns is given in the in clause. In this example the in clause returns the value of the variable step3, which is 21.

It’s important to understand that the in clause can reference any or none of the variables in the variable list. It’s also important to understand that, while the variable list might look like procedural code it isn’t, it’s just a list of variables that can be in any order. The UI will always generate code where each variable/step builds on the value returned by the previous variable/step but when you’re writing your own code the variables can be in whatever order that suits you. For example, the following query also returns the value 21:

The in clause returns the value of the variable step3, which in order to be evaluated needs the variables step2 and step1 to be evaluated; the order of the variables in the list is irrelevant (although it does mean the Applied Steps no longer displays each variable name). What is important is the chain of dependencies that can be followed back from the in clause.

To give another example, the following query returns the numeric value 7:

In this case, step2 is the only variable that needs to be evaluated for the entire let expression to return its value. Similarly, the query

…returns the text value “Hello World” and doesn’t need to evaluate any of the variables step1, step2 or step3 to do this.

The last thing to point out is that if the names of the variables contain spaces, then those names need to be enclosed in double quotes and have a hash # symbol in front. For example here’s a query that returns the value 21 where all the variables have names that contain spaces:

How does all this translate to queries generated by the UI? Here’s the M code for a query generated by the UI that connects to SQL Server and gets filtered data from the DimDate table in the Adventure Works DW database:

Regardless of what the query actually does, you can now see that there are three variables declared here, #”Filtered Rows”, dbo_DimDate and Source, and the query returns the value of the #”Filtered Rows” variable. You can also see that in order to evaluate the #”Filtered Rows” variable the dbo_DimDate variable must be evaluated, and in order to evaluate the dbo_DimDate variable the Source variable must be evaluated. The Source variable connects to the Adventure Works DW database in SQL Server; dbo_DimDate gets the data from the DimDate table in that database, and #”Filtered Rows” takes the table returned by dbo_DimDate and filters it so that you only get the rows here the DayNumberOfWeek column contains the value 1.

That’s really all there is to know about let expressions. It explains why you can do the kind of conditional branching that Avi Singh describes here; and also why, when I first tried to come up with a way to time how long a query takes to execute, I had to bend over backwards to ensure that all the variables in my let expression were executed in the correct order (though it turns out there’s an easier way of doing this). I hope you find this useful when writing your own M code.

Some time ago I wrote the following post on how to work out how long your M query takes to execute in Power Query:

http://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2014/11/17/timing-power-query-queries/

While it’s still relevant for Power Query and now of course Power BI (and it also illustrates some interesting facts about query execution), recently I had an interesting discussion with Colin Banfield in the comments section of that post that led to us finding an easier way of measuring query execution times.

In M, the DateTime.LocalNow() function returns the current system date and time at the time the function is called – which means that you could call it multiple times in the same query and get different results. There’s also the DateTime.FixedLocalNow() function which also returns the system date and time; the difference between the two is, as the documentation says:

This value is fixed and will not change with successive calls, unlike DateTime.LocalNow, which may return different values over the course of execution of an expression.

The question here is, though, what time does DateTimeFixedLocalNow() actually return? I asked on the Power Query forum here and Ehren from the Power Query dev team revealed that it returns the system date and time at the point when the query begins.

This means that it can be used to simply the original method I used to find query execution. Here’s a query that uses Function.InvokeAfter() to create a delay of 5 seconds during query execution and returns the difference between the values returned by DateTime.LocalNow() and DateTime.FixedLocalNow():

If you’re using this on a real query I strongly recommend you read my original post carefully and make sure that all of the steps in your query are executed, but does make things a little bit easier.

When you’re writing an M expression for a custom column in Power BI or Power Query it’s easy to reference the values in other columns. A slightly more difficult question, however, is how can you reference column values dynamically? For example, given the following input table:

How can you use the values in the “Column To Select” column to dynamically select values from either Column 1, Column 2 or Column 3? For example, on the first line of the table the “Column To Select” column contains the value 2, so the calculated column should contain the value from “Column 2”; on the second line of the table the “Column To Select” column contains the value 1, so the calculated column should contain the value from “Column 1” and so on:

There are a number of different ways to achieve this. You could, for instance, write a nested if or do some other kind of fancy conditional logic in M, but this could result in a lot of code. You could also unpivot all the columns except “Column To Select”, do some filtering, then pivot the data again but that would also be quite complicated. Probably the easiest way of doing this is with the Record.Field() function, which allows you to get the value of any given field in a record by passing the name of that field as a text value.

Here’s an example query that generates the table shown in the first screenshot above in its first step, sets some data types on the columns in the second step, then creates the custom column shown in the second screenshot in the final step:

Here’s the expression for the custom column isolated, in the form that you would use in the Add Custom Column dialog:

Understanding how to use the Record.Field() function here leads us to an interesting side discussion about custom columns, functions, records and each expressions. The full M expression for the third step in the query is:

The first two parameters of the Table.AddColumn() function are straightforward but if you read the documentation you’ll see that the third parameter requires a value of type function. This function is called for every row in the table and returns the values in the custom column. It doesn’t look like it but there is a new function being defined here. In M an each expression can be used to define a function that has no name and that takes one parameter whose name is _ (ie the underscore character). The Table.AddColumn() function passes this new function a value of type record representing all of the values in the current row of the table, and that means Record.Field() can access this record by using _. What’s more, when referring to fields in this record you don’t even have to say _[Column To Select], you can drop the underscore and just say [Column To Select], as in the code example above. All this means that the expression

is basically the same as

…which, if you know a bit of M, makes a lot more sense but for the average user is probably more intimidating.