Authoring reports with direct push data

[ChrisWilliams]

I'm trying to build a workable PowerBI solution as an ISV. My goal is to use the existing PowerBI service (not embedded) to present data dashboards. I'm not against embedded, but that will come a bit later.

I've tried several other approaches, such as publishing my data using OData, but didn't see the success I'd hoped for, especially with large data sets.  So now I'm considering direct push through the rest API.

If I take this approach, I believe that I have to author reports in the cloud and won't be able to use PowerBI desktop.  Am i correct in that?  If I author in the cloud, how will I save what I author so that I can apply it elsewhere?  When I had a .pbix file, I could always upload it to a customer's PowerBI environment through REST.

It would be ideal to get a schema and data from my cloud instance, and then download back to the desktop app so that I could author there.  Then when I was happy with what I had, I could pubish the .pbix to another customer's Power BI workspace and start sending data, which would cause their reports to populate. And do this over and over.

Any suggestions or anyone able to point me in the right direction?

[Eric_Zhang]

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@ChrisWilliams wrote:

I'm trying to build a workable PowerBI solution as an ISV. My goal is to use the existing PowerBI service (not embedded) to present data dashboards. I'm not against embedded, but that will come a bit later.

I've tried several other approaches, such as publishing my data using OData, but didn't see the success I'd hoped for, especially with large data sets.  So now I'm considering direct push through the rest API.

If I take this approach, I believe that I have to author reports in the cloud and won't be able to use PowerBI desktop.  Am i correct in that?  If I author in the cloud, how will I save what I author so that I can apply it elsewhere?  When I had a .pbix file, I could always upload it to a customer's PowerBI environment through REST.

It would be ideal to get a schema and data from my cloud instance, and then download back to the desktop app so that I could author there.  Then when I was happy with what I had, I could pubish the .pbix to another customer's Power BI workspace and start sending data, which would cause their reports to populate. And do this over and over.

Any suggestions or anyone able to point me in the right direction?

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I don't know any way to upload a PBIX via Rest API to Power BI Service. Could you share how you make it? The online documentation only shows how to get a dataset and push rows to the tables in the dataset through Rest APIs.

However in Power BI embeded, there's a way to import pbix files.

[ChrisWilliams]

Hi Eric, the REST api to upload a .pbix file is described at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt243840.aspx.  This creates a new dataset in your cloud account and creates reports based on what's in your .pbix file.  I've done this successfully.

However if then you want to manipulate this data with some of the REST apis like a Row Operation (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt203566.aspx), those operations will fail.  At this time, it doesn't appear that you can manipulate the row data from a .pbix that you uploaded.

The only way that you can do direct push of data is to create the tables and schema yourself and then send the data.  Alternately there's a new way in the web client to create a real-time data source.  But, the point is that the data is in the web client through either of these methods, and it seems you have to author reports there.  I don't see a way to author offline in the desktop client and then match that up with real-time or push data once you've sent your report definitions to the cloud.

Chris