David Wagstaff on 12 Oct 2023 15:13:31
Allow users to create custom aliases in Power BI to fields in their model which are stored as part of the model (so that the alias is not specific to an individual report) and allow the user to overwrite a given alias inside of custom visual.
The process would look something similar to; a developer builds his model with field names using snake_case. When they go to create a report using said model, the end-users HATE snake_case and would prefer to see correctly formatted fields using Proper Case. So inside of the model, the developer can set custom aliases on the fields such as; "order_number" to be Order Number. This way, whenever the field "order_number" is used in a visual, let's say a basic table, the column header will automatically display "Order Number" while in the fields list (which only the developer sees), will display "order_number", which will allow them to track fields back to the back-end model.
Also, allowing for the ability for the developer to overwrite the custom alias with something specific to the given visual (take the basic table example), instead of showing the column header as "Order Number", the developer needs to show, for only this visual, the column header as "Company XYZ Order Number". This way, only the alias in the basic table is changed but throughout the report the model field "order_number" displays as "Order Number".
The last most powerful feature of this would be the ability to set these custom aliases once which is why it should be done in the model & not in the front end. This reduces duplicative work & allows for a better workflow for developers.