Forum Discussion

tomepenn's avatar
tomepenn
New Member
7 years ago

Print and/or export to PDF from PowerBI Embedded Report

Gentemen, we asked out partners about this in early 2017.  The answer was end of the year or maybe first quarter for the export to pdf feature.  We only have one basic workaroud by using window.print...
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stuartb's avatar
stuartb
Frequent Visitor
7 years ago

I've been banging my head against Power BIs inability to export natively to PDF for some time.

What we have done is to utilise AWS Lambda functionality to run Chromium into which we embed the report and save that to S3, served back to the customer as a download.

It's a faff, annoying, but works quite well 
https://github.com/sambaiz/puppeteer-lambda-starter-kit/blob/master/README.md


I'm pretty sure you could adapt this for Azure Functions too....
Might help 
Kvotava's avatar
Kvotava
Frequent Visitor
6 years ago

stuartb 

I am running embedded powerbi in puppeteer in aws lambda, but I am getting hung up on knowing when the report is done being rendered. How do you wait for the report to finish, so you know its time to create the PDF (or whatever). Currently I am sleeping, but I am trying to find a better solution to that. I did try to hook into the "rendered" event, but I can't seem to get that to fire.

 

I also did hook up to the public preview of this feature, but the restrictions on it are far too great to be viable.

 

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

 

-Kenny

  • stuartb's avatar
    stuartb
    Frequent Visitor
    6 years ago

    Hi
    Firstly kudos to the person/site that set me on the right track: https://www.sambaiz.net/article/132/
    Secondly, it's been some time since I did this and we've changed the design from using Node to Pupeteer Sharp

    Hope the following helps, it's a code snippet of the funtion that I used to embed the report.  Note it's not code complete nor would I suggest it's production ready! In essence all it does is wrap up the "embed" call in a promise and only then create the pdf.

     

    Note: thee is a 'wait' in the code - I don't think I hooked up to the render with my prototype; just assumed that the API woudl render in less than 5secs. I know we did change this to something more robust, but I dont have access to the codebase for it as I no longer work on the project.

    exports.exportPdf = async (browser, pbi) => {
    const magic = Math.floor(Math.random() * 100000);
    const filename = 'report-' + magic.toString() + '.pdf';
    const localPath = '/tmp/' + filename;
    loggit('>> generated filename: ' + filename);

    const pageHtml = '<!DOCTYPE html>' +
        '<html>' +
        '    <head>' +
        '    <meta charset="utf-8" />' +
        '    <title>Printed PDF</title>' +
        '       <style> #reportContainer { height: 750px; width: 100 %; max-width: 1000px; } </style>' +
        '    </head>' +
        '    <body>' +
        '    <h1>Report</h1>' +
        '    <div id="reportContainer"></div>' +
        '    </body>' +
        '</html>';

    loggit('>> new page');
    const page = await browser.newPage();

    loggit('>> generate filename');
    await page.addScriptTag({ path: './powerbi/powerbi.js' });
    await page.setContent(pageHtml);

    loggit('>>>Power BI stuff');
    await page.evaluate((a, b, c) => {
        const models = window['powerbi-client'].models;
        const config = {
            type: 'report',
            tokenType: models.TokenType.Embed,
            embedUrl: a,
            accessToken: b,
            id: c,
            permissions: models.Permissions.Read,
            viewMode: models.ViewMode.View,
            settings: {
                filterPaneEnabled: false,
                navContentPaneEnabled: false
            }
        };
        powerbi.embed(reportContainer, config);
    },
        pbi.EmbedUrl,
        pbi.EmbedToken.token,
        pbi.ReportId
    );

    loggit('waiting');
    await page.waitFor(5000);

    loggit('exporting pdf from chromium');
    await page.pdf({ path: localPath, format: 'A4', landscape: true });

    loggit('reading pdf');
    const aws = require('aws-sdk');
    const s3 = new aws.S3({ apiVersion: '2006-03-01' });
    const fs = require('fs');
    const pdf = await new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        fs.readFile(localPath, (err, data) => {
            if (err) return reject(err);
            resolve(data);
        });
    });

    loggit('writing pdf');
    await s3.putObject({
        Bucket: 'a-stu-bucket',
        Key: filename,
        Body: pdf,
    }).promise();

    loggit('closing page');
    await page.close();

    loggit('returning');
    return filename;
};