Script to pull Power BI information and create a custom Search for users

At my company, our Power BI reports have expanded significantly over the years. It’s been great and has had a huge impact on the business. However, the growing number of available reports has occasionally made it challenging to locate the most relevant information quickly.

A couple months ago, I started looking into using the Power BI REST API to pull our Power BI information and ultimately create URL links to every individual page we have available to the business, across all reports.

After a lot of fine-tuning, some ChatGPT help, and the team’s creativity, we have created a PowerShell script that pulls all of our Power BI information and paired it with a simple excel catalog of report page definitions….ultimately ending with a custom search ‘report’ for our users (shared in the same Power BI App as our primary company reports)

I’ve modified the final script to make it more universal to the masses and wanted to share. The link below is only for the PowerShell script - but it’s the main building block to then add onto it for a similar solution….or just a great tool for governance of what is available within Power BI in general.

The script will output an Excel doc with all the Power BI info related to:

• Workspaces

• Datasets

• Reports

• Pages within Reports

• Apps

• Reports within Apps

(URL links to each Power BI report page follows the same pattern of using a combination of Workspace ID or App ID, Report ID, and Page ID)

Side note: for ease of sharing, this script is entirely user-focused. It does not require any computer or Power BI Admin rights or an Azure app/secret. This also means the Power BI results will be specific to the permissions of the user who runs it.

This will also check for every PowerShell module and rights and install if necessary. I tried to make it so no matter what, even if you’ve never used PowerShell, simply copying and pasting the script will output the excel file into the directory defined in the first line of the script!