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I've read that PowerPivot doesn't support the automatic creation of entity relationships when consuming OData feeds.

Can anyone confirm this and is anyone aware of the PowerPivot OData roadmap? Is it coming?

Thanks, Mike

Mike Mengell
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1 Answers1

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Yes that is correct. Relationships are lost when imported into PowerPivot.

This is why best practice is to expose ForeignKey properties from your Data Services, that way you can rebuild the relationship in PowerPivot.

In terms of when / if PowerPivot will add better support for relationships - we ( I am a Program Manager ) on the OData team hope so, but there isn't a firm commitment or timeframe yet.

Alex James
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  • Great to get an answer from someone on the inside, thank you very much. I'd love to know what is in the road map for OData. Is it something which you're allowed to discuss or should I go through my MS account manager? – Mike Mengell Jan 02 '11 at 19:33
  • Well we are pretty transparent about our plans on OData.org - you should join the mailing list - to see what things we have planned etc. Having said that there are lots of teams a Microsoft doing OData related efforts, and not all of them are directly involved in OData.org so it probably makes sense to talk to your account manager too. – Alex James Jan 03 '11 at 03:47
  • Subscribed. Thanks for the feedback. If you need a beta tester for OData let me know. I'd love to use it for the whole companies MI. – Mike Mengell Jan 04 '11 at 13:06
  • @AlexJames, do you know of any updates on this issue? We are trying to expose a custom (dynamic) data model to excel/powerpivot and are desperate to get relations working. Manually rebuilding the relations is not feasible because of the complexity of the model. – Simon Opelt Nov 15 '13 at 11:43