Exporting data from a standard PowerBI Visual to an external API

developmenttend — Thu, 07 May 2020 13:33:09 GMT

Hi all,

we are still a bit new to PowerBI and integrations, but what we want is actually pretty straightforward, but we weren't able to
get a decent starting point just by googling.

Imagine you have a report with some filterable data. And you want to open this data in an external application.
We were wondering if there was some way to export this data with just a click of a button. We were thinking about
some way to create a button which uploads the currently visible data from a given visual via ajax to some API we build
for that purpose.

Is this possible, and what's a good starting point to read into this stuff?

Re: Exporting data from a standard PowerBI Visual to an external API

dm-p — Fri, 08 May 2020 21:30:42 GMT

Hi @developmenttend,

In terms of core functionality you can't automate the export of data from within Power BI reports in the way you're proposing.

You can manually export the data from a visual using the options in the visual header, if your administrator has permitted it.
If you're on premium, you could write an integration outside of Power BI that generates a query using the XMLA endpoint and then sends it on somewhere else.

Visuals can't talk to other visuals. They also don't have access to the data model - the data is pushed into the visual from Power BI based on the combination of fields/measures in the properties pane.

While cross-filtering and slicing has the appearance that a visual is affecting others, any such operations are requests from the visual to the main window via an API to request that it filter other visuals on its behalf and Power BI will delegate to other visuals based on their interactions.

You can write a custom visual that can export its own data to an endpoint but this endpoint needs to allow requests from any domain as a custom visual is a sandboxed iframe with very limited functionality. But in short, this is still within its own particular context and can't reach outside itself to other visuals.

Regards,

Daniel

topic Exporting data from a standard PowerBI Visual to an external API in Developer

Exporting data from a standard PowerBI Visual to an external API

Re: Exporting data from a standard PowerBI Visual to an external API