This is a feature only accessible to reporting customers.
This article discusses how you can integrate your reporting data into Power BI.
The reporting is where you can access clean/pre-processed/prepared data from the Railnova team. Pairing this with Power BI, a powerful data visualization and dashboarding tool by Microsoft, can help you build and explore your KPIs.
Click and play
The simplest way to integrate the reporting data into Power BI is to download the data source file in the reporting module.
Head to the reporting page: https://one.railnova.eu/reporting/
Download the source file by clicking on the "Download the file" button
You should have downloaded a file with the ".pbids" extension. This is a Power BI file that defines a data source. You can now open the file in Power BI (to add the source to an existing Power BI project, see Adding the source manually).
When you open the file, Power BI will try to connect the first time to the Railnova data source. It will ask for the authentication details to access the data.
Make sure the authentication type selected is "Basic"
Enter your Railnova authentication information (email and password)
Once the connection is successful, you should be able to choose between the different datasets available through the reporting and click on load.
Now, you must wait for Power BI to fetch the data the first time, and you will be ready to start creating dashboards in seconds.
Adding the source manually
If you are not starting a brand new project and prefer to add this data source to an existing PowerBI file, this is also possible.
Head to the "Get data" section in Power BI and select "Web" as a data source.
You can stick to the basic setup and enter the following URL:
You must replace [my-company] with your company name inside the platform.
Then, follow the steps from the "Click and play" approach described above regarding authentication.
Refreshing data
You can manually refresh or schedule refreshes in Power BI to make sure you access the latest available data. Currently, reporting data is updated once per day and should be available to you before 07:00 each morning.
Troubleshooting
In this section, you can find step-by-step solutions to problems that may occur while integrating data through the Power BI Connector.
Error reading asset
By default, Power BI uses the content of the files to automatically detect the type of each column in the data imported. Asset (locomotive) names are often similar to numbers. Power BI might detect asset names as a number column and then tell you some rows in your data table are in a state of error because it can't interpret a non-numerical name as a number.
To solve this:
Close the load dialogue (as above)
Head to the data view, select the problematic table, and click on "Transform Data > Transform Data"
A new window should open. Click on the asset column of your data, head to the Transform tab, and switch its Data type to text
Confirm the change of Data type by replacing the current transformation
Close and apply the changes to your data source
Reading columns of type: Date-time
By default, PowerBI sometimes converts the columns with datetime format to integer values. So, the date column looks like this:
To solve this:
6. Head to the data view, select the problematic table, and click on "Transform Data > Transform Data"
7. A new window should open. Click on the date column of your data, head to the Transform tab, and switch its Data type to date/time
8. Confirm the change of Data type by replacing the current transformation
9. Close and apply the changes to your data source
Now you can work as intended, and future data refresh should not be impacted by the problem anymore.
Support
Do you still have questions? Go to the Railnova platform and click "Contact us" for help!