How can I reference a .pqm file from a .pq file in Power Query SDK?

[robnelder]

I am working through Microsoft's TripPin Custom Connector walkthrough tutorial. In Part 7 there is a section on refactoring some code into separate .pqm files and referencing these from the .pq file.

The code in the sample uses an M Query function Extension.Contents() to get the contents of the .pqm file(s). However in my code VS Code underlines this as a compilation error with the message "Cannot find the name 'Extension.Contents'.powerquery(Error.UnknownIdentifier)".

Even when I download the full code sample from the related Microsoft GitHub project I get the same issue.

I wonder if this is because the version of the VS Code extensions I'm using is too recent and the tutorials and sample code have not been updated, I have tried some older versions without success.

How do I resolve this?

I am currently using the latest extensions:

• Power Query / M Language v0.1.60
• Power Query SDK v0.4.0

[geologyrocks]

It's been a while since I checked it exactly, but try running the extension anyway with the red squiggles.

Others can give more detail, but it's something to do with the version of Power Query being used by VS code that it struggles to detect the Extension.Contents method.

[robnelder]

I think I figured it out. I noticed that if I open just the TripPin part 7 sample code folder in VS Code (rather than the top level "DataConnectors" folder from the GitHub repo) then the compilation error goes away.

Then by a "spot the difference" process I noticed that there was a difference in the settings.json file in that folder vs the code I was working on. The third line of the settings.json file (below) was missing from my code, once I added this everything worked fine.

{
  "powerquery.sdk.defaultQueryFile": "${workspaceFolder}\\${workspaceFolderBasename}.query.pq",
  "powerquery.sdk.defaultExtension": "${workspaceFolder}\\bin\\AnyCPU\\Debug\\${workspaceFolderBasename}.mez",
  "powerquery.general.mode": "SDK",
}