The SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) editor for Tabular models has been improved in the recent updates. For example, the Tabular Model Explorer enables you to quickly jump between the entities of your model organized in a hierarchical way. However, when it comes to editing DAX measures, you are still constrained in a user interface where you can only modify one measure at a time. Moreover, when you have hundreds of measure in the same Tabular model, every change you apply might require a few seconds of waiting time, because of the validation executed each time.
Several years ago, a first version of DAX Editor for Visual Studio was created by Nick Medveditskov, a former developer of the Analysis Services team who released the tool to the community as an open source project. Later on, I and Teo Lachev contributed to upgrade the tool when new versions of SSDT were released (Visual Studio 2012 and 2013). However, such a version was no compatible with the new compatibility level (1200) introduced by Analysis Services 2016, which saves the model in a JSON format instead of XML. Thanks to the collaboration of a few customers who wanted to migrate this tool to the new version of Analysis Services, we (at SQLBI) hired a developer who helped us in this migration and now a new version of the DAX Editor is available in the Visual Studio Gallery.
DAX Editor 2.0 supports both XML and JSON formats (compatibility levels 1103 and 1200), and it can be installed on Visual Studio 2012, 2013, and 2015.
You can see a quick introduction of how to install and use it in the DAX Editor – Introduction video (just 3’).
A more detailed explanation of how to install and start to use DAX Editor is available in the article Using DAX Editor on SQLBI.
The source code is available on GitHub.
Finally, a single page with all the links is available in DAX Editor tools on SQLBI.
One warning and one request. The warning first: despite the many tests we did, there will be certainly other bugs. Create a backup of your BIM file before using DAX Editor, you don’t want to lose your hard work because of a bug in an editor!
The request: please, report any bug in the Issues page on GitHub, write a review if you like the tool, and if you are interested in contribute to the development of new features, contact me to request access.