Power BI Timeout using Power BI Connector

Ant Fawkes
Ant Fawkes
Third Anniversary
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® APIs

Quick Power BI and Blackbaud SKY API question. Do you know if it's possible when calling the gifts api to limit the data being pulled based on date added eg: I want to only pull gifts that have been added in the last 5 years? It seems that with the power bi connector you have to pull back all of the data and then filter it out using transformations in Power Query which means that my API Call is timing out - if anyone can point me in the right direction I'd be grateful. #PowerBI #Blackbaud #connector #SKYAPI

Comments

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 3 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    @Ant Fawkes
    One of the problem of using Power BI Blackbaud connector directly: getting more data for use.

    The way to handle this would be to use Power Automate to pull data down (gift list action will allow you to specify gifts added in the last 5 years). The data that is returned is in JSON format and maximum you can pull is 5000 records at a time, so you need to handle pulling multiple 5000 per API call.

    Once you have the data, you can dump it into sharepoint list, sharepoint excel, csv, SQL server, etc. and Power BI can connect to these data source to works its magic that way.

  • Matt Thacker
    Matt Thacker
    Fourth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    Hey @Ant Fawkes,

    The Gift table in the Power BI connector is based off of the GET Gift List endpoint of the API. In the .pq file that is used to compile into the connector, there's a variable set on line 1195 that sets the base url that Power Query calls to get the list. You can add a parameter to that base url (formatted based on the endpoint documentation). I'd recommend setting a new variable to get the current time and subtracts 5 years and use the variable as the date_added parameter.

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