Power BI is turning 10! Tune in for a special live episode on July 24 with behind-the-scenes stories, product evolution highlights, and a sneak peek at what’s in store for the future.
Save the dateEnhance your career with this limited time 50% discount on Fabric and Power BI exams. Ends August 31st. Request your voucher.
I have to develop a visual, and I wanted to use Power BI Desktop to this.
In visual.ts (for which I'm of course using an editor) I suppose to be some errors, which I want to find using some
console.log('Location 1234');
messages.
Where can I see my logfiles?
I know about this settings -> options -> diagnostics stuff, where I checked "Enable tracing" and examined the dump/traces folder.
There are a lot of .log files but my messages are not included.
What am I doing wrong?
Did I miss something?
Is it at all possible to use BI Desktop for developing visuals?
How to continue?
Solved! Go to Solution.
Hi @Anonymous,
Power BI Desktop isn't a functioning browser and uses CefSharp to render the report canvas and some other parts that have parity with the Service.
Adding browser developer tools would be a non-trivial task for a small subset of users. Although you could also create an idea for it - I'd be happy to vote on it if you do 🙂
In my opinion, while debugging in Desktop is desirable, the browser is a sensible location for testing and debugging as the majority of end users will be consuming your visual in the Service as readers, and browsers offer the ability to extend dev tools on offer (e.g. if your using React or Redux, you can install additional tools to help debug these frameworks).
The developer visual is updated more frequently via the Service also, so we get access to new features more readily than having to wait until the next Desktop release, when a newer developer visual host might be packaged in with it (it typically is).
If you absolutely have to use Desktop and want some form of diagnosis, you can use alert() to display errors in a message box, but this is not a great workaround (it won't work in the Service). What might be a better approach is to add an element like a textarea to your visual and append output into that (and have this enabled or disabled through a global constant or class, so that when it's ready to move to production, it's hidden from your end users.
Good luck,
Daniel
Proud to be a Super User!
On how to ask a technical question, if you really want an answer (courtesy of SQLBI)
Hi,
If you are still struggling with this problem, I have just written a blog about how to get Dev Tools working with Power BI Desktop.
Please follow the link:
Br, Mikko
Hi @Anonymous,
Power BI Desktop isn't a functioning browser and uses CefSharp to render the report canvas and some other parts that have parity with the Service.
Adding browser developer tools would be a non-trivial task for a small subset of users. Although you could also create an idea for it - I'd be happy to vote on it if you do 🙂
In my opinion, while debugging in Desktop is desirable, the browser is a sensible location for testing and debugging as the majority of end users will be consuming your visual in the Service as readers, and browsers offer the ability to extend dev tools on offer (e.g. if your using React or Redux, you can install additional tools to help debug these frameworks).
The developer visual is updated more frequently via the Service also, so we get access to new features more readily than having to wait until the next Desktop release, when a newer developer visual host might be packaged in with it (it typically is).
If you absolutely have to use Desktop and want some form of diagnosis, you can use alert() to display errors in a message box, but this is not a great workaround (it won't work in the Service). What might be a better approach is to add an element like a textarea to your visual and append output into that (and have this enabled or disabled through a global constant or class, so that when it's ready to move to production, it's hidden from your end users.
Good luck,
Daniel
Proud to be a Super User!
On how to ask a technical question, if you really want an answer (courtesy of SQLBI)
Great information and advice. Thank you Daniel!
Check out the July 2025 Power BI update to learn about new features.
User | Count |
---|---|
6 | |
6 | |
3 | |
2 | |
2 |