Docebo Please stop changing field names

  • 16 February 2024
  • 10 replies
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Jtischler
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Partial rant….

I have to believe I am not the only one impacted!

We have automation setup to pull daily reports into PowerBI.  Whenever Docebo changes a field name, even the case of a character from upper case to lower case, this causes an error that then requires modification within PowerBI to match the updated field name.

 

Yesterdays output(2/15/2024):

 

 

Newest report output (2/16/2024):

 

The change in character case throws the errors.

You can see the inconsistency in nomenclature, where the majority have all words upper case, but some have only the first letter of the field:

PLEASE stop changing field names once introduced into the live platform, and remain consistent in nomenclature!!!

10 replies

jhouwen

Yes, ran into a similar issue.
Change log would be nice to have. 

B
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@Jtischler I’m wondering how you automated the reports in BI... By integrating BI into Docebo? or other ways?

If so, could you assist me with your use case? I've run into a similar situation in which we need to compile a report and turn it into a BI dashboard.

S
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Hi @Jtischler 

We didn’t noticed something similar yet, but we are not that far in the integration. Is it related to a particular source?

One source of this might be someone at your company making slight changes to the localization tool. Here an example:

But it could also be an update from Docebo.😊

Jtischler
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@Baskaran venugopal I have scheduled reports come in to outlook and routed to a folder with outlook rules.  Then I have Power Automate take the reports and save them specified folders on a server.  I have these folders as the source folders for all the Power BI Queries and I use a gateway on PBI to refresh the data on a daily basis.

Full disclosure it was a challenge to get all of this set up, I needed to find an internal resource that had the skillset to convert formats, parse information etc… also to work around file size limitations writing to the server.

The same could be accomplished writing to sharepoint, but the flaw with that is that if I leave then everything breaks as its tied to my login creds.  Using a server and on premise gateway allows this to run autonomously.

I am happy to give you an overview of what it looks like if that helps.  Just let me know!

Bfarkas
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So while I agree, we should at least be notified of these types of changes, it is a good opportunity to update your setup for the future, especially since from the sounds of it you are already doing pieces of this. Anyways, common practice when pulling reports into a process to normalize/transpose the data into how you want it, rarely would I recommend using the given names during the process, but rather insert your own or at least normalize them so like all lowercase or something like that, but most often end up breaking down the report data set as indexable columns of information you can then associate to headers/tags you decide, and makes you immune to these types of changes in the future. It’s an extra step in the process, but saves against these headaches and since probably need to do updates now anyways, might be worth exploring. 

Also….and this gets waaaaay more involved, but if using power automate anyways, you could move straight to using the API to query the reports and skip the entire email to folder setup(although have used that extensively too) the saving file to your server is the step you could insert some control to never deal with this again  

 

Jtischler
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Thanks @Bfarkas.  I appreciate the insight and suggestions.  Unfortunately, for now, the internal support of Power Automate has been revoked as the IT dept reviews what platforms are considered in scope for support.  I got lucky when I had a sharepoint issue that I found a resource to help with PA.  As soon as some higher ups caught wind of it, he was told to stop as they reviewed if in scope. 

The lack of an API resource in the dept that I have access to for support is also a challenge, I am unable to setup/ use any API’s at this time.  I have been pushing internally for a couple years now for this.  The skillsets are available in the organization, I don’t get the internal business reasons of teams supporting each other cross functionally to create automation and efficiency…   

Bfarkas
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Thats unfortunate and totally understand @Jtischler , just wanted the idea on the thread too for others who might find themselves in similar boats. Hopefully some resources are found for you soon.

B
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@Baskaran venugopal I have scheduled reports come in to outlook and routed to a folder with outlook rules.  Then I have Power Automate take the reports and save them specified folders on a server.  I have these folders as the source folders for all the Power BI Queries and I use a gateway on PBI to refresh the data on a daily basis.

Full disclosure it was a challenge to get all of this set up, I needed to find an internal resource that had the skillset to convert formats, parse information etc… also to work around file size limitations writing to the server.

The same could be accomplished writing to sharepoint, but the flaw with that is that if I leave then everything breaks as its tied to my login creds.  Using a server and on premise gateway allows this to run autonomously.

I am happy to give you an overview of what it looks like if that helps.  Just let me know!

I found some alternate options using Excel's “paste link." Connect multiple sheets using the paste link, and the final sheet data will be refreshed manually in Power BI. Since our requirements are very minimal, we are merely creating a dashboard for only compliance trainings, not more than that. So, this option really helps us.

 

U
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Thank you @Jtischler for addressing this matter. We have the same issue. Our reports are imported into Qlik Sense on a monthly basis. As soon as someone notices that the statistics haven’t been updated, I have to ask our colleagues to change the names in the Qlik Sense import tool.

Being informed by Docebo that field names have been changed would be a first step, but not changing existing names would be even better!

Bfarkas
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Userlevel 7
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@Baskaran venugopal I have scheduled reports come in to outlook and routed to a folder with outlook rules.  Then I have Power Automate take the reports and save them specified folders on a server.  I have these folders as the source folders for all the Power BI Queries and I use a gateway on PBI to refresh the data on a daily basis.

Full disclosure it was a challenge to get all of this set up, I needed to find an internal resource that had the skillset to convert formats, parse information etc… also to work around file size limitations writing to the server.

The same could be accomplished writing to sharepoint, but the flaw with that is that if I leave then everything breaks as its tied to my login creds.  Using a server and on premise gateway allows this to run autonomously.

I am happy to give you an overview of what it looks like if that helps.  Just let me know!

I found some alternate options using Excel's “paste link." Connect multiple sheets using the paste link, and the final sheet data will be refreshed manually in Power BI. Since our requirements are very minimal, we are merely creating a dashboard for only compliance trainings, not more than that. So, this option really helps us.

 

Highly highly recommend asking around, I’d bet you have access to power automate based on the other items, and you could not have to do the copy paste manually pretty simply, without programming.

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