pbi check loop

pbi-check-loop — close the loop on Power BI Desktop

Power BI Desktop has no command to reload a PBIP that changed on disk.

The sync only runs one way. Memory → disk exists: File → Save, Ctrl+S. Disk → memory has nothing. So when an agent edits a measure in TMDL, the running Desktop keeps its old model — and if you then press Ctrl+S in Desktop, it overwrites the new disk content with the stale in-memory model. The edit is gone.

This skill supplies the missing direction, plus a way for an agent to see what it produced, so AI-assisted Power BI development becomes a closed loop instead of one that stops for a human every iteration.

The two tools

pbi-reload.ps1 — check and reload.

• -ListOnly reports what is running (PID, edition, title) and whether disk files are newer than the running instance.
• -Yes restarts Desktop so it re-reads TMDL and PBIR. It terminates without saving, so the stale model can never win; it cleans up the orphaned msmdsrv process and reopens the same project in the same edition, with the window restored where it was.
• -Wait blocks until the model has actually finished loading, and prints where to query it:

Ready after 23s - title settled and the model engine is up.
  Analysis Services: localhost:58894   [msmdsrv 29412]

That last line is the point. A screenshot proves the report rendered; only a query proves the numbers are right. The port is resolved by process ancestry rather than read from msmdsrv.port.txt — which, with two projects open, belongs to whichever loaded last, and will silently connect an agent to the wrong project's model.

-Wait matches the project name rather than the Untitled - Power BI Desktop title, which never settles on a localized Desktop (the zh-CN build shows 无标题).

pbi-shot.ps1 — capture the Desktop window to PNG, or -Text for plain text read through the UI Automation tree: dialog text, visual titles, matrix headers, cell values. Text is often more precise than the image — a column truncated on screen as SALES_DETAIL_BY_RE… comes back whole.

What it does not do

• It does not make loading faster. This is a restart, not a hot reload. The window does close, and the model load remains the dominant cost per iteration.
• The agent cannot operate the report. No scrolling, clicking, or page switching. If the problem is not on the current screen, a human navigates there first.
• It does not verify numbers. That is ADOMD's job, and that loop already existed.
• A reload is not a data refresh. It never goes back to source. Change a partition's M expression and that table's cached data is invalidated — it comes back empty, along with tables whose M references it. That is expected, not a broken edit.
• Not every bad edit produces a dialog. A broken calculated table opens normally and fails silently.

Relationship to the Power BI Desktop Bridge

Desktop shipped a Desktop Bridge in June 2026 — preview, build 2.155.756.0 or later, behind a Preview Features toggle. It is a local JSON-RPC server inside the Desktop process exposing four methods, and two of them overlap directly with this. Where they overlap, prefer the Bridge: its reload is in-process — no restart, no full model load, nothing destroyed if you had unsaved changes — and its snapshot renders internally rather than capturing a window.

What those four methods leave open:

• Reach. The Bridge needs a recent build and a preview toggle. Managed corporate installs do not move quickly, and Power BI Report Server Desktop is a separate product where there is no indication the Bridge exists at all. A PowerShell script runs against whatever is installed.
• Errors. application.state.get/v1 returns currentFilePath and hasUnsavedChanges. Nothing else. When Desktop rejects a file, no method, trace log, stderr, or event log says so — the error exists only as an on-screen dialog.
• The model. No port, no query surface.

Requirements

Windows · PowerShell 5.1+ · Power BI Desktop · a .pbip project. macOS and Linux are not supported — Power BI Desktop does not exist there. MIT licensed.

Install

Unzip, then run:

.\install.ps1

It copies the two scripts to ~\.claude\tools\ and the skill to ~\.claude\skills\pbi-check-loop\, then verifies PowerShell syntax and UTF-8 BOM on every file it writes. Restart your agent to activate it.

On a multi-agent machine, always pass -Path: the script matches the project name against window titles to find your instance, and never touches another agent's Desktop.

Source and full findings: https://github.com/C-QY/pbi-check-loop