Metadata

Metadata is information about a value that is associated with a value. Metadata is represented as a record value, called a metadata record. The fields of a metadata record can be used to store the metadata for a value. Every value has a metadata record. If the value of the metadata record hasn't been specified, then the metadata record is empty (has no fields). Associating a metadata record with a value doesn't change the value’s behavior in evaluations except for those that explicitly inspect metadata records.

Metadata records

A metadata record value is associated with a value x using the syntax value meta [record]. For example, the following associates a metadata record with Rating and Tags fields with the text value "Mozart":

"Mozart" meta [ Rating = 5,
Tags = {"Classical"} ]

A metadata record can be accessed for a value using the Value.Metadata function. In the following example, the expression in the ComposerRating field accesses the metadata record of the value in the Composer field, and then accesses the Rating field of the metadata record.

[  
    Composer = "Mozart" meta [ Rating = 5, Tags = {"Classical"} ],
    ComposerRating = Value.Metadata(Composer)[Rating]   // 5
]  

Metadata records aren't preserved when a value is used with an operator or function that constructs a new value. For example, if two text values are concatenated using the & operator, the metadata of the resulting text value is an empty record [].

The standard library functions Value.RemoveMetadata and Value.ReplaceMetadata can be used to remove all metadata from a value and to replace a value's metadata.

Limitations

Some hosts that use Power Query to transform or move data don't support storing custom metadata into storage. The following hosts don't support storing the custom metadata:

• Power BI dataflows
• Fabric Dataflow Gen2
• Power Platform dataflows