Communication between visuals, shared memory, iFrame scaling and maximum file size for pbiviz

[Eliasaki92]

Hi,

I am looking into developing custom visuals according to the international business communication standards "IBCS" in Power BI.

As potential show stoppers I discovered the following points and I am wondering whether some custom visual expert can help me with that:  

1. 2 or more custom visuals on the same report must be able to find each other and communicate thru messages with low latency
2. 2 or more custom visuals on the same report must have access to a common memory
3. Custom visuals must be able to open dialogs for configuration that are larger than their iframe. Or their iframe can be programmatically increased to maximum size with 100% scaling while configuring
4. It seems that there is a limitation in the file size of the components in "pbiviz.json -> externalJS", as from a certain file size (~2MB) upwards, the *.pbiviz package could not be loaded in PowerBI Web anymore, giving an error message "Request size too large"
   
   

Many thanks for your support and best regards from Germany,
Elias 

[v-viig · Accepted solution]

Hello @Eliasaki92

1. I dodn't think that this is possible but you might try to use postMessage to send messages to other iframe.
2. That's impossible due to iframe isolation. Are you able to merge two custom visual into common code base in order to achieve the shared memory?
3. That isn't possbile. However, you might open another window by using Launch URL API.
4. Yes, you're right. Power BI doesn't allow to import pbiviz that is larger than 2MB. It'd be better to reduce code size that is included into pbiviz. Another option is to unzip the pbiviz file and zip it again using another compression level.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Ignat Vilesov,

Software Engineer

Microsoft Power BI Custom Visuals

[email protected]

[Eliasaki92]

Many thanks for the quick and complete answer!