Announcing Folder in Workspace in Public Preview
In the past, a workspace would always end up being filled by hundreds of items as the project progressed. It would become harder and harder to find an item, or to put related items in the same place. This leads to cluttered workspaces and decreased productivity during collaboration.
Today, we are very excited to announce that Folder is now in public preview! It will be available soon for you to try in next few days.
As an organizational unit in the workspace, folder addresses this pain point by providing a hierarchical structure for organizing and managing your items. You can group and categorize your fabric items in a structured and efficient manner by quality of data, categories of analysis, deployment stages, aligning with git directories or any other criteria.
Use folder to organize your workspace
Getting started with folders is quick and easy. Simply create a new folder from the “+New” menu. You can also create nested subfolders within a folder, up to 10 levels deep.
Workspace folders support any kind of Fabric item from any workload or provider within Fabric. After you create a folder structure that makes sense for your project, you can start to move items. You can move individual items or muti-select a set of related items and move them together.
To create a new item in the folder, you can navigate to the target folder and select item from ‘+New’ to start creation flow.
For Power BI developers, currently you can upload your .pbix file to a folder directly. Publishing report from Power BI Desktop to a folder in workspace will be coming soon in the following months.
To further organize the workspace, you can also rename a folder, or delete an empty folder if need. The experience is very straightforward and intuitive, just like what you would expect when using Windows or OneDrive.
Folder permission model
Workspace admins, members, and contributors can create, modify, and delete folders in the workspace. Viewers can only view folder hierarchy and navigate in the workspace. Currently folders inherit the permissions of the workspace where they’re located.
Use deployment pipeline with folder
When you deploy items in folders to a different stage, the folder hierarchy is automatically applied.
In deployment pipeline, folder path is considered as part of an item’s name. You can see folder paths are shown when hovering over the name of an item.
When an item is deployed, if its path is changed, for example from folder A to folder B, then Deployment pipelines identifies this as a settings change and applies this change to its paired item during deployment. If folder B doesn’t exist in the stage we’re deploying to, it will be created in this workspace first.
For more information, please visit folder in deployment pipeline documentation.
View folder hierarchy in Power BI Mobile Apps
The Power BI Mobile apps support folders in workspaces so you can access items that are organized in folders inside of your workspace directly from the mobile app.
Workspace and folders are Fabric entities, which means that you can add items that are not necessarily Power BI items to a workspace. But the Power BI Mobile apps only support a subset of Power BI items. Therefore, only the Power BI item will be accessible when you are browsing the folder content from the app. If a folder contains only non-Power BI items, it will appear empty in the mobile app.
Next steps
Folder in workspace is currently in public preview, which means there are still some limitations, and we plan to resolve them in the coming months. We welcome your feedback and suggestions on how to improve Folder and make it more useful for your work. You can send us your feedback through the Fabric feedback channels.
We hope you enjoy using Folder and find it helpful for your projects! Please keep an eye on more coming updates.
To learn more about Folder, please visit folder documentation page.
