Assemble Release Notes – July 28, 2020

Assemble Systems will have a brief upgrade and maintenance outage Tuesday, July 28th between 8:00 PM and 12:00 AM CT. During this time, your Assemble site will be offline temporarily. Thank you for your patience while we perform maintenance.

We are pleased to announce that with this release, we will have a new Assemble publisher add-in available to download on our website. The new Assemble publisher add-in includes the following enhancements:

Rebar families are now published from Revit
Power BI Integration: Using the latest PowerBI template it is now possible to include a thumbnail image of an Assemble Model View in your reports
Scheduled refresh now supported with Power BI reports (Please look below for detailed instructions)

**UPDATING THE PUBLISHER ADD-IN IS NOT REQUIRED**

However, we highly recommend that you upgrade the add-in to take advantage of all the enhancements.

Latest Publisher Add-in can be downloaded here on the night of July 28th, 2020.

Note: We recommend uninstalling the old add-in before installing the latest version. A new add-in will be available for Revit, Navisworks, Power BI, Excel and Schedule Integrator.

We have also fixed the following:

Assemble Excel Add-in: Errors when Updating Unit Cost Property from Excel
Assemble Excel Add-in: deploy for all users on an enterprise deployment
Assemble Schedule Integrator: better XER support
Revit Publisher: Revit Merged and Divided Part’s Parent don’t publish in Assemble
Revit Publisher: 2D Sheet publishing improvements
3D Viewer: Grouped by “None” in the Inventory does not activate ghost mode in 3D Viewer
3D Viewer: Improving some elements ID handling using the AutoCAD publisher which resulted in extra geometry being processed by the 3D viewer. (creating performance issues)
3D Viewer: Any changes while Using a “Data Tree Description” in color by property will automatically update the 3D viewer

If you have any questions regarding the update, please feel free to contact Autodesk Support team.

———————————————- Power BI Release Notes ————————————————

Power BI Scheduled Refresh Now Available!

We are happy to announce support for scheduled refreshes via Power BI reports with the July release. Reports created using the Assemble Data Connectors can now be published to the PowerBI online service and configured to automatically refresh the data. Reports created using the template require additional changes to the report and do not support scheduled refresh out of the box. Reports using the Assemble Views connector only require going through the “Gateway and Data Source Setup”.

***Breaking Change***

Version 4.18.1 of the Assemble Connect connector has a breaking change related to an existing bug that was fixed. Some users experienced missing properties in the list of available properties as well as a duplicate column name error when more than one property had the same display name. In order to fix this issue any properties with duplicate names will be renamed to be the property name appended with their type in parenthesis. Additionally, Assemble Properties will have “(Assemble)” appended to their name.

These changes will however break some users reports upon their next refresh. Any visuals or calculations that use a property that has been renamed based on the above logic will need to be updated to reference the new property name.

Install the On-premise data gateway (ideally to a server that is always online) Download
Follow the documentation for setting up a custom data connector
From the Power BI online service, you should have a new data source with Assemble Connect or Assemble Views as the data source type
Sign-in to the data source and add the data source
Publish a report to the online service if you have not already done so ***If you are using a report that is based on the template you will need to follow the steps outline for template-based reports***
From the Power BI online service in the left-hand navigation panel expand your workspace and under Datasets find your dataset, click the three dots to open the menu and choose “Schedule Refresh”
Expand the “Gateway connection” section and choose the gateway you just set up
Click the drop down and select Assemble Connect (if you built the report using the template) or Assemble Views if you are using the views connector
Now expand the “Scheduled refresh” section and turn on “Keep your data up to date”
1. Set a frequency and add a time then click “Apply”
If you want to test that the refresh works you can click the three dots next to your dataset and choose “Refresh now”

Follow these steps if you have a report based on the provided template:

Open your report and choose “Transform data” or “Edit Queries” for older versions of Power BI
On the left select the Project query and locate the Id column
At the top click “Advanced Editor”, a new window will open
On the second line you should see Source = Assemble_Connect.Contents(#”Organization Url“, #”Selected Project”, null, #”Selected Properties Json”),
Replace the second parameter #”Selected Project” with #table({“Id”}, {{“1”}} where 1 is the Id of the project you want to load
1. If you’re loading more than one project it will look like #table({“Id”}, {{“1”},{“2”}}
Replace the fourth parameter #”Selected Properties Json” with “[]” (include the double quotes)
Repeat steps 2-6 for the Model and Model Version queries
For the Grid Data query first select the Selected Properties Json query and copy the text in the window
1. Open a text editor and find and replace the “ with two “” so that it looks like the following: [{“”Id””:””GrossFloorArea“”,””Name””:””Gross Floor Area””,””Unit””:””M2″”,””DataType””:””quantity””,””Type””:””numeric””,””Source””:””model””}]
2. With the Grid Data query selected repeat steps 2-5
3. Instead of replacing #”Selected Properties Json” with “[]” replace it with the text you got (and modified) from the Selected Properties Json, the text should be enclosed in quotes
4. ***Note any changes to the project(s) or properties you wish to load will require you to update the text
For each of the Selected Project, Available Properties, Selected Properties, and Selected Properties Json queries right click and uncheck “Enable load”
Close & Apply your changes, your data should load if everything is correct
Publish your report and complete steps 6-10 of “Gateway and Data Source Setup”