Table of Contents

Interactive Mode

  • 2026-05-12
  • Peer Grønnerup
Applies to:
  • ❌ Tabular Editor 2
  • ❌ Tabular Editor 3
  • ✔ Tabular Editor CLI
Important

The Tabular Editor CLI is in Limited Public Preview. It is offered for evaluation with a Tabular Editor account; no license is required during preview. Commands, flags, and outputs may change before general availability. The preview build stops functioning after 2026-09-30. We recommend against using the CLI in production CI/CD pipelines during preview. Please refer to our license agreement.

Interactive mode is a guided read-eval-print loop (REPL) for exploring a model from the terminal. It's the gentlest on-ramp for users who are new to command lines, and a convenient workspace for ad-hoc sessions against a single model.

Starting a session

To Start a session run any of these commands:

te interactive                              # Start and connect to a model later
te interactive ./model                      # Start with a local model
te interactive -s MyWorkspace -d MyModel    # Start with a remote model

The session prints a welcome banner, shows the active model, and opens you at a model-aware prompt:

Tabular Editor CLI interactive mode session

If no model is set, the prompt is just te> - simply use connect for connection picker, connect <path> or connect <workspace> <model> to connect to one.

Commands inside the session

Once a REPL has started, every te subcommand is available without the te prefix:

ls tables
get "Sales/Revenue" -q expression
query -q "EVALUATE TOPN(5, 'Sales')"
bpa run --fail-on error

Each command accepts --help the same way it does outside the session:

deploy --help

Quoting and DAX-style paths

The REPL line splitter recognises the same quoting forms as object paths so DAX-shaped references are interpreted as a single argument:

  • '...' and "..." - single- and double-quoted segments. The quote characters are stripped, doubled quotes escape a literal occurrence.
  • [...] - bracketed segment. Brackets are preserved in the resulting argument so a path like 'Internet Sales'[Sales Amount] reaches the command as one token that the path parser can re-interpret as a DAX reference. Doubled closing brackets (]]) stay verbatim for the same reason.
get 'Internet Sales'[Sales Amount]   # One argument, DAX form
get [Total Sales]                    # Lone-bracket model-wide lookup
ls 'Net Sales'/'Sales Amount'        # Quoted segments with a slash separator

Unterminated groups absorb to end of line, so a stray opening quote or bracket fails with an explicit error rather than splitting silently.

Built-in REPL commands

These are handled by the REPL itself, not the regular command tree:

Command Purpose
help or ? List available commands.
status or pwd Show the active model/connection.
clear or cls Clear the screen.
exit, quit, or q Exit interactive mode.

Guided prompts

When interactive mode is active, commands that need missing input prompt for it instead of failing. Running auth without a subcommand opens a picker for Login / Status / Logout; running deploy without --force shows a summary and asks for confirmation (n is the safe default).

To disable prompts for a single command inside the session, pass --non-interactive.

When to use interactive vs. non-interactive

  • Interactive mode is best for exploration, learning the CLI, one-off bulk edits against a single model, and demos.
  • Non-interactive mode (the default outside te interactive) is what you reach for when scripting, automating, or running in CI. See Automation and Scripting and CI/CD Integration.

The two share the same command tree - anything you run inside te interactive can be pasted into a shell script by prefixing it with te.