To Develop PowerBI Visuals

Question

I hope I'm not asking too much, but could someone, using this bar chart as an example, post a sequence of which methods in the visual source are called (and how the data is converted and passed) when:

• The visual is added to the dashboard in PowerBI,

• A category and a measure are assigned to the visual,

• Data filter in PowerBI changes,

• An element on our custom visual is selected.

• Your option which you think may be relevant

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I used this specific visual as an example because it was mentioned as meeting minimum requirements for contributing a new custom visual, which sounds like a good starting point, source:

New Visual Development

Please follow our minimum requirements for implementing a new visual. See the wiki here.

(the link references the bar chart tutorial)

However, if you have a better example visual - please use that instead.

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This is all I got:

Answer 1

A few comments on your graphic. You are obviously using the view model (good):

• After any data change, filter change, or object change (format in your pic), visualTransform() is called. The data comes in odd formats so will need repackaging (for anything other than simple). That gets done here and a data object that the developer defines gets returned. I build this data object as an array because d3 loves arrays.
• update() is then called (I think your arrow in the pic here is the wrong way around). This is slightly tricky because d3 interaction now comes into play. If you have used d3().enter (and you probably have) then that executes only once so on a subsequent PBI update() only d3() non-enter instructions are followed. If you put everything in d3().enter then any subsequent data update won't appear to work.
• Alternatively you can d3().remove() and rebuild the svg on each PBI update(). Whether this is practical will depend on your data and the visual.

Thank you for having a crack at documenting the flow. MS documentation is very lame at the moment.