Tabular Editor Blog

Tabular Editor 3 August 2023 Release

Written by David Bojsen | August 23, 2023

It is August and its time for a new version of Tabular Editor 3. Summer is heading into its waning days and even though the plan was to make minor improvements and fix bugs in this release, we couldn’t help ourselves and had to get a new feature in: Support for Direct Lake datasets.

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

Table Of Contents

  1. New features

  2. Improvements

  2. Bug Fixes

New features

Preliminary support for Microsoft Fabric DirectLake mode

Tabular Editor now supports adding tables to DirectLake datasets through the Import Table Wizard. Moreover, you can update the schema of existing tables through the usual right click. Tabular Editor utilizes the SQL endpoint of your Fabric Lakehouse to obtain the table schemas. Watch the video bellow for a quick tutorial and read our blog article dedicated to Direct Lake datasets.

Direct Lake datasets edited in Tabular Editor 3

NOTE

This version of Tabular Editor will let you import tables / update table schemas on models that already have a DirectLake connection.
The Import Table Wizard does not yet support creating a new DirectLake connection on an empty model. This will be added in a future release.

WARNING

Currently, there is a limitation in Microsoft Fabric so once you make any changes to a DirectLake dataset through the XMLA endpoint, you will no longer be able to open that dataset in the Web Modelling feature of Fabric.

C# Preprocessor

A new functionality within C# scripting that determines the version of Tabular Editor is available. This is quite useful when creating scripts for both Tabular 2 and 3 as there can be small differences between how the C# Script is compiled in each.
For more information and a code example of the preprocessor directive please see our documentation.

Improvements

We’ve made a few minor improvements as well in the August release.

AMO/TOM support for Binary XML

Microsoft recently announced that the AMO/TOM client library now supports Binary XML, promising great performance improvements for 3rd party tools (such as Tabular Editor). So naturally, we’ve made sure that Tabular Editor 3 now uses the latest version of AMO/TOM.

“-Copy” Instead of ” Copy”

A small but impactful change is that when duplicating objects, the new object will be post-fixed “-Copy”. This is done to ensure that trailing spaces are less likely to occur when for example batch renaming objects of after having duplicated them.

.bim Auto backup

The automatic backup feature has gotten a tweak that so that the name of the .pbix file is used in the .bim file name instead of a GUID.

TMDL Preview-3

With the latest version of AMO/TOM the newest TMDL preview is now also applied in Tabular Editor 3.

Other Improvements

  • Table Preview Performance
  • Auto-complete auto adjust

Bug Fixes

We have made multiple bug fixes in 3.10.0; please see our release notes for full details.

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