What next given pbip?

[andy-clapham]

The new pbip format is a good progression from MS, but it duplicates a lot of the rationale behind pbi-tools.

That's not to say pbip solves the problem of development change management across large reports, or multiple reports across an organisation yet:
Every tab/page in a report is in one big file, every table in one big file, each report visual config in one serialized json string, each m expression in one long escaped string.

• my current most complex bim is 3MB - 90K lines, the report.json is 7MB - 22K lines - and the root config entry of the report.json is 601K of json serialised in one line ...
  That's really not something I want to merge in vscode every change!

Given the well known adage: "A file should only have one reason to change", perhaps there's room for a utility here to expand the pbip output to something more conducive to development.

Also some cli refactoring utils would be awesome - most common one for us is schema changes that need propagation to dependant reports, just simple column renames would be a godsend.

Interested to hear your thoughts, and whether you've had any contact with MS re serialization design?

[OhadSrur]

+1 on "most common one for us is schema changes that need propagation to dependant reports, just simple column renames would be a godsend."