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by tycho01 3959 days ago
Would you perhaps have any info/reference about where I could learn more about this reverse engineered PowerPivot API? This sounds pretty exciting. :D

To expand on my question, I'd heard (from Rob 'PowerPivotPro' Collie, former product manager on the project IIRC) that the core had been written in 'unmanaged code' (probably C++?), so I believe reverse engineering it would be a significantly larger effort than just opening some of its DLLs in say DotPeek, at least from as far as I've been able to tell.
1 comments
mistermann 3958 days ago
The PowerPivot engine itself I imagine is in unmanaged code, but the code that just writes datasets and whatnot to the model is (from what I've heard)managed code, and indeed you can decmpile the libraries and see all sorts of things, I've only looked around for about 10 minutes or so. And I had just read on some obscure thread that someone had successfully found the undocumented API call to write to the model, which is what I'm wanting to do - but I don't even know what the product name is that supposedly does this, sorry.
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tycho01 3958 days ago
Right, makes sense, I'll try and check out what's available then. :)

By writing to the model, you mean programmatically adding new measures or the like?

My interest is in programmatically querying models using DAX, though to this end I'd also look to look in the direction of Microsoft's DirectQuery mode in SQL Server which supposedly did DAX-to-SQL conversion.

If one could use such a conversion plus MDX to start querying models on an Apache Spark cluster through pivot table/chart interfaces...

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mistermann 3957 days ago
Not even measures, I'm just wanting to be able to create tables, define relations, etc, with the accompanying sql or m script. I'm hopeful they'll let us do that some day, but I still don't quite believe they've changed their stripes entirely.
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