How to edit or clear permission using Power Query in Power BI. Explain with an Example

In Power BI, Power Query doesn't directly manage permissions or access rights to data sources. It's primarily a data transformation and preparation tool. However, you can utilize Power Query to filter or manipulate data based on certain conditions, which might indirectly affect permissions in your data model.

Let's consider an example where you want to filter data based on certain conditions, effectively restricting access to certain rows of data.

Suppose you have a dataset containing sales data, and you want to filter out sales records for specific regions based on user permissions.

Here's how you can achieve this using Power Query:

1. Connect to your data: Start by connecting to your data source (e.g., Excel file, SQL database, etc.) using Power Query in Power BI.

2. Load your data into Power Query: Load the dataset into Power Query Editor by selecting the data source and clicking on "Transform Data".

3. Identify permissions criteria: You may have a separate table or mechanism where you define user permissions. For this example, let's assume you have a table named "UserPermissions" containing the list of users and their permitted regions.

4. Merge tables: Merge your sales data with the "UserPermissions" table based on a common field such as region.

5. Filter data based on permissions: After merging, you can filter out sales records where the user's region doesn't match the permitted regions in the "UserPermissions" table. This filtering can be done using Power Query's filtering capabilities.

Here's a simplified example of the M code to achieve this:

let
    // Load sales data
    SalesData = Excel.Workbook(File.Contents("C:\Path\to\your\file.xlsx"), null, true),
    Sales_Sheet = SalesData{[Item="Sales",Kind="Sheet"]}[Data],

    // Load user permissions data
    UserPermissions = Excel.Workbook(File.Contents("C:\Path\to\your\permissions.xlsx"), null, true),
    Permissions_Sheet = UserPermissions{[Item="UserPermissions",Kind="Sheet"]}[Data],

    // Merge sales data with user permissions
    MergedData = Table.NestedJoin(Sales_Sheet, {"Region"}, Permissions_Sheet, {"Region"}, "MergedData"),

    // Expand the merged table
    ExpandedData = Table.ExpandTableColumn(MergedData, "MergedData", {"User", "Permission"}),

    // Filter data based on permissions
    FilteredData = Table.SelectRows(ExpandedData, each [User] = "Current_User")
in
    FilteredData

In this example, "Current_User" represents the logged-in user whose permissions are being applied.

6. Close and Load: After applying the necessary transformations, close and load the data into Power BI.

By performing these steps, you can indirectly use Power Query to control access to data based on certain conditions, effectively simulating permission management within your Power BI dataset. However, for more robust access control mechanisms, you would typically rely on the underlying data source's security features or implement Row-Level Security (RLS) directly within Power BI.