There’s a moment in every Fabric semantic model lifecycle where the “click it in the UI” approach stops scaling.
It usually happens when you need to rename dozens (or hundreds) of fields to match a business glossary, or when Dev is stable and you’re ready to point the same model at a new Lakehouse for Test/Prod. That’s when the model stops being a diagram and starts being an artifact—something you want to treat like code.
This guide reflows the whole workflow end-to-end, using the Fabric service Edit in Desktop experience to open the model, exporting it to a PBIP project stored as a TMDL folder, editing that folder externally (no scripting inside Power BI Desktop), and then getting those changes back into the service—including the key capability you asked for:
- retargeting the entire model to a different Lakehouse/Warehouse, and
- retargeting a single table to a different physical table (even in a new Lakehouse).
We’ll do it with the mindset of Power BI + Microsoft Fabric development: repeatable changes, visible diffs, and fewer “hand edits” you regret later.
Continue reading “Edit, Retarget, and Redeploy: A Practical TMDL Folder Workflow for Fabric Semantic Models”