Power BI replacing a web application?

[aabouniaj]

Hello,

I'm new to Power BI and I come from a Software Engineering background. I was given a task to write a POC that would display the power of business intelligence and analytics. Currently, we have a web application that uses basic reporting and analystics. I'm trying to figure out a way to avoid rewriting the web application and use POWER BI as the main application with our templates wrapped around it. With the support of Authentication/Authorization.

Does Power BI support such thing?

Thank you,

[Eric_Zhang]

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@aabouniaj wrote:

Hello,

I'm new to Power BI and I come from a Software Engineering background. I was given a task to write a POC that would display the power of business intelligence and analytics. Currently, we have a web application that uses basic reporting and analystics. I'm trying to figure out a way to avoid rewriting the web application and use POWER BI as the main application with our templates wrapped around it. With the support of Authentication/Authorization.

Does Power BI support such thing?

Thank you,

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@aabouniaj

With the support of Authentication, you can use Embedding with Power BI users (users own data). In this approach, each user who would like to access the embedded reports has to login with their own Power BI account. You can reference this github demo User Owns Data.

Another approach Embedding with non-Power BI users (app owns data)(Power BI premium license required) can work with Row level security to do some kind of authorization. In this case, you can control the roles of the report viewers. People who access the the embeded reports doesn't login with any Power BI account, they can see limited data according to RLS configuration.

For both approaches, you would have to somewhat "rewrite" your web application to integrate the authentication part. For embedding part, it can simply use Power BI Javascript API.

[aabouniaj]

@Eric_Zhang

Thank you for your response. Is it possible if Power BI can act as a web application? Customized and built via HTML and CSS from our end with Navigation and menus? Or, we have to build some sort of a Shell around the visuals and the dashboards? I read somewhere that Power BI can allows authentication/authorization using active directory and LDAP.

[Eric_Zhang · Accepted solution]

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@aabouniaj wrote:

@Eric_Zhang

Thank you for your response. Is it possible if Power BI can act as a web application? Customized and built via HTML and CSS from our end with Navigation and menus? Or, we have to build some sort of a Shell around the visuals and the dashboards? I read somewhere that Power BI can allows authentication/authorization using active directory and LDAP.

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@aabouniaj

Embedding reports via this approach Embedding with Power BI users (users own data) can allow Azure active directory authentication. I don't exactly know what you mean acting as a web application, it is underlying adding a <iframe> to your own web page. You can surely build some sort of Shell around the <iframe> via Power BI Javascript API, see these live demos. 

[aabouniaj]

@Eric_Zhang

From the sound of it, Power BI can not act as a replacement to our current web application. We are trying to replace our old web application with something new instead of rewriting the whole application with new technology. I was wondering if Power BI has some sort of a template that lets us modify and make it look like a web application to replace ours.

I understood the concept of using <iframe> and create some sort of a shell around it using HTML and CSS as your suggestion.

Thank you so much @Eric_Zhang. I really appreciate your help!

[Greg_Deckler]

You want to probably look at Power BI Embedded. Another approach is that you could use the Publish to Web feature and just iframe/embed it into your web application display. But the latter route won't provide specific authorization for the Power BI content.