Forum Discussion
'Post in Group' API using Nodejs
Hello. I am implementing a feature that allows a user to upload a .pbix file from their local machine through our webpage and have it published into a Power BI workspace by our web app's server. The only way I was able to get this to work was by creating a temp file of the user's .pbix on the server, calculating it's length, and then sending the POST /imports request with a `Content-Length` header with that length along with a stream of the temp file.
My main question is this: does the POST /imports endpoint require the 'Content-Length' to be calculated before the request is sent? I am trying to avoid storing potentially large temp files on the server (which is how I can get the length). The ideal scenario is that the file streams from the browser to the nodejs server, and then directly to the Power BI API endpoint. I have tried various http libraries and various combinations of headers and received a few different errors from Power BI. Sometimes I get 500 Internal Server Error responses with no detail, and sometimes I get 400 InvalidFileSizeError responses like this:
{"error":{"code":"InvalidFileSizeError","pbi.error":{"code":"InvalidFileSizeError","parameters":{"FileSize":"9223372036854775807"},"details":[],"exceptionCulprit":1}}}
It seems that with nodejs if a 'Content-Length' header is not specified when sending a stream it might default to using `Infinity`. Not sure if that is pertinent or not.
Here's a rough idea of the code that prints responses from Power BI:
const fetch = require('node-fetch');
const FormData = require('form-data');
const form: FormData = new FormData();
// readStream is a stream from the post request to the node server from the browser and is made with `createReadStream` from the 'streams' module
form.append('', readStream);
const url = `https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/${workspaceId}/imports?datasetDisplayName=${displayName}&nameConflict=Abort`;
const options = {
method: 'POST',
body: form,
headers: {
Authorization: `Bearer <token>`,
...form.getHeaders()
}
};
return fetch(url, options)
.then((res) => {
console.log(res.ok);
console.log(res.status);
console.log(res.statusText);
console.log(res.headers.raw());
return res.text();
})
.then((data) => console.log(data))
.catch((err) => {
console.log(err);
});
If anyone knows the reason for these errors or has any experience with streaming forms to Power BI, any help would be very very much appreciated. Thank you!
Helpful links
- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/imports/postimportingroup
3 Replies
- dpiretHelper I
Hi nfadili , did you sort this out.
I'm having the exact same message issue using Axios (I guess FileSize: '9223372036854775807' means infinite?). Mi pbix file size i s just 194KB
My code is quite similar to yours
async postImportInGroup(groupId, datasetDisplayName) { try { let AccessToken = await auth.getMicrosoftToken(); var formData = new FormData(); formData.append(datasetDisplayName, fs.createReadStream(__basedir +'/pbix/workspace-master.pbix')); var headers = formData.getHeaders(); headers['Authorization'] = `Bearer ${AccessToken}`; headers['content-type'] = 'multipart/form-data' const options = { method: 'POST', headers: headers, data: formData, url: Mustache.render("https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{{groupId}}/imports?datasetDisplayName={{datasetDisplayName}}", { groupId: groupId, datasetDisplayName: datasetDisplayName }), }; let response = await axios(options) return response.data }cheers
- nfadiliFrequent Visitor
Hey dpiret,
I ended up contacting MSFT support about this issue shortly after posting here. They told me that the Content-Length header is required but is not listed in their documentation https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/imports/post-import-in-group - they also told me that they would update the documentation to include this detail but have not done so.
I am still using the method I described above (write the file to disk, calculate length, submit, delete from disk) but I would prefer not to. If you figure anything else out please share 🙂
- dpiretHelper I
Hi nfadili
I made it work, but I'm unsure whether it will help you.
I used form-data's async getLength() function, which returns the length of the stream. This length is not exactly the file's lenght you obtain from the disk:
- fs.statSync(__basedir +'/pbix/workspace-master.pbix').size: 199460
- from getLenght: 199672
A crude working version looks like this
try { let AccessToken = await auth.getMicrosoftToken(); var formData = new FormData(); formData.append(datasetDisplayName,fs.readFileSync(__basedir +'/pbix/workspace-master.pbix')); var options={}; options.method= 'POST'; options.data= formData; options.url= Mustache.render("https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{{groupId}}/imports?datasetDisplayName={{datasetDisplayName}}", { groupId: groupId, datasetDisplayName: datasetDisplayName }); var headers = formData.getHeaders(); headers['Authorization'] = `Bearer ${AccessToken}`; headers['content-type'] = 'multipart/form-data' formData.getLength(async function(err, len) { headers['Content-Length']=len; options.headers= headers; console.log(`uploading PIX ${datasetDisplayName} to the workspace ${groupId}`) let response = await http.axios(options) console.log(`It may have worked\n${JSON.stringify(response.data)}`); return response.data });I guess I'll see you around 😉
d