Power BI - Power App embedded - Deployment

[PKroon]

I created a Power App in a development Environment, which I deploy to UAT-PROD trhought DevOps pipelines. In the Power BI report I add the Power App Visual and connect this to the Power App in development. When I deploy the report (pbix) through a devops pipeline, I like to update the visual to link to the right app. I can seem to find how to do this in the MS documentation or in a video on YouTube.

btw: the Power App and Power BI uses different pipelines.

Is it possible to update the report Power App visual to  link to the right environment/Canvas App?

I hope somebody can help me 🙏

[PKroon]

Somebody how can help with this?

[Anonymous]

Hi  @PKroon ,

Based on my understanding, Power Apps correspond to different app links in different environments. The Power BI report binds the PowerApps visual based on the app link. If your Power Apps have been migrated to a new environment through the DevOps pipeline, the Power App Visual added to the Power BI report also needs to be updated and bound to the new environment. Alternatively, you can directly bind the Power Apps app in your new environment. Whenever the app in the new environment is updated, the Power BI report, which is bound to the app via the app link, will also update after refreshing the page.

Best Regards,

Liu Yang

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[PKroon]

Hi Liu, 

Thanks for your reply.

You are right that the Power App is deployed to different environments (DEV-UAT-PROD) and for each App the Environment Id and App id is unique. But the Power BI report does not use the environment id, but only the app id. Also Environments (Apps/Solutions) and Workspaces (Power BI) is not a simular thing and are not connected to eachother (for as far I know).

From investigation: When you would unzip the Power BI report and open the Layout.json file, we can find the visual and see that on two place there is the reference to the app, formatted as: /providers/Microsoft.PowerApps/apps/0000-0000-0000-0000-000000000 (last part is a guid). This is located in visualContainers.x.config and visualContainers.x.dataTransforms. In there is a object with the reference, I believe this is the part handeling that the right app is opened 

\"objects\":{\"general\":[{\"properties\":{\"appId\":{\"expr\":{\"Literal\":{\"Value\":\"'/providers/Microsoft.PowerApps/apps/0000-0000-0000-0000-000000000'\"}}}}}]}

This Layout.json file is packed inside of the report and not in the semantic model. Where we can easily update the datasource used by the semantic model, for as far I can see this is not possible for the report visuals. Because the reference is hardcode in the file this is deployed to all workspaces.

I would make sense that you can set a parameter in your pipeline which updates the appId.