Feeding hierarchy metadata from custom connector

[bdeboe]

Hi, We're working on an ODBC-based connector to a database that has snowflake schemas with fact and dimension tables for which I have plenty of metadata available. I'd like to be able to feed this to Power BI through a navigation table that represents an actual dimension from my snowflake and immediately tell Power BI about the hierarchy it captures. I have three questions:

1. How to tell PowerBI there's a hierarchy expressed in my table. Say I have a simple star schema with a Product table that has a ProductName and Category column. How can I tell PowerBI that these make up a two-level hierarchy and avoid requiring the user to do this manually?
2. When I have a snowflake schema, is there a way to merge the different tables that make up a single dimension? Suppose Product and ProductCategory are separate tables for the same dimension. To flatten them manually, I would go to "Edit Queries", select Product and leverage the relationship inferred from the FK between them to simply expand ProductCategory (or use "Merge Queries" first) and add the columns to the Product table. Can I feed this information from my connector to avoid the manual steps?
3. The snowflake schema obviously includes a number of identifier columns that are used in FKs but that I don't want to bother my users with. Can I hide them from the connector without upsetting the FK discovery?

Many thanks in advance for all hints and pointers, benjamin