Connecting PowerBI to Oauth Provider Data Source

[danielraexavier]

Hello - my company runs a web application.  I work mostly as a front-end developer, but I've been charged with doing research to figure out how our clients who use PowerBI could pull data from our application into PowerBI.  I envision a flow like this:  In PowerBI Desktop, the user selects our application as a data source and proceeds through steps to authorize PowerBI to access our application's data in a read-only format. Our application already has some capabilities for OAuth built into it, so using an OAuth authorization mechanism could be an option.  But I'm not really sure where to begin.  Any help or advice on how to get started would be appreciated. 

[Eric_Zhang]

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@danielraexavier wrote:

Hello - my company runs a web application.  I work mostly as a front-end developer, but I've been charged with doing research to figure out how our clients who use PowerBI could pull data from our application into PowerBI.  I envision a flow like this:  In PowerBI Desktop, the user selects our application as a data source and proceeds through steps to authorize PowerBI to access our application's data in a read-only format. Our application already has some capabilities for OAuth built into it, so using an OAuth authorization mechanism could be an option.  But I'm not really sure where to begin.  Any help or advice on how to get started would be appreciated. 

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@danielraexavier

IMHO, there're below ways to connect your data to your client.

1. You shall design Data feed APIs in your application and ask your client to call the API in Power BI Desktop via "get data"->"other"->"Web".
2. Maybe you can use a web storage(Onedrive, Google Drive, dropbox etc) and expose the storage to your client. For many storage services, there're various APIs which make uploading and consuming files, say excels,csvs, in a programmable way possbile. Eg, you can access an excel in Onedrive for business via "Web" in option one.
3. If you're using a cloud database, expose it to the users with a restricted read-only pression. And then connect to the database with indivisual connector in Power BI Desktop.

I think there're more ways and it all depends on your own scenario.

[danielraexavier]

Thanks for your reply!  I was considering option number 1, but that requires making our community data public.  The web database and cloud storage options are interesting too...  Although I was hoping we'd be able to take advantage of our oauth provider status to make an easy connection with PowerBI

[danielraexavier]

And/or does anyone know much about creating a content pack for Power BI?  Maybe I could do that for my app's data...