Forum Discussion
Problem embedding report - "This content isn't available"
I'm going to wrap this up by clarifying my use case and explaining what I did to work around my issue. First of all, I'm following the "User Owns Data" scenario, or "embedding for your organization" depending on what documentation you're looking at. The goal is not to use a master account to authenticate, but rather for the end user to authenticate with his/her account and then be presented with the content that they are authorized to view. I'm building a custom portal to improve upon the user experience provided by powerbi.com, and adding metadata features in the process.
The main factor with my issue turned out to be the fact that I was opening a new browser window in order to display the embedded report/dashboard. I never discovered why that poses a problem, but I have successfully worked around the issue by instead displaying the embedded content in an overlay that takes up the full browser window. The only properties that I need to pass into the config object to the powerbi.embed function are type, accessToken, and embedUrl. I don't have to deal with embed tokens at all to make this work.
I will also mention that I had a very frustrating experience dealing with Microsoft tech support on this issue, so I'm happy to clarify anything about my solution for people that might stumble upon this post. I opened a support incident through my MSDN account, and ended up spending many hours over the course of several weeks providing diagnostic information to the Power BI product team. They really never did anything for me except ask me to jump through lots of hoops, which I did, and it never got me an answer to my question about why I got an error when embedding the content in a new browser window.
Thanks for your reply, discjosh1dp! To clarify, users of my application typically will NOT have Power BI Pro licenses, but will be members of the workspace(s) in question. Based on your understanding, does that mean I need to use embed tokens or not?
Regarding your code sample, agreed that every sample I had seen previously specified models.TokenType.Embed even when they made no mention of using embed tokens. Unfortunately, switching to models.TokenType.Aad made no difference for me. Note that even though I am using C# to retrieve available workspaces and report/dashboard information from the Power BI API, I'm still using JavaScript for the embedding.
Gotcha - if you're using a single "master" account to authenticate your application (i.e. not going the adal.js route described above), then yep, you should be requesting an embed token, and "models.TokenType.Embed" is the correct setting.
An embed token is, as you've surmised, distinct and separate from the authentication token you've already acquired. In short, the authentication token describes what you have permission to see, while the embed token grants specific permission to load content you can see outside of the Power BI application.
Had to dig a while to find this, but specific requests and call parameters for each type of embed token are documented here:https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt784614.aspx (it was last updated in October 2017, so it should still be accurate).
Full disclosure: my team hasn't tried this approach yet (we'll likely shift to it in the coming months, hence my interest in your question). Let me know if it works?
Thanks again for sharing what you know, discjosh1dp. I'll definitely keep you posted as to how this resolves. I just opened a suport ticket with Microsoft yesterday because the trial and error approach is wearing me down.
My workflow is different from what you describe. The idea is not to authenticate with a master account. Rather, each user authenticates to our Azure AD instance as themselves, and they see whatever content they are authorized to see by virtue of the workspaces (AD groups) that they are a member of. I don't know if that warrants an embed token or not but I'll find out from the authorities.
FYI, the link you shared in your last post doesn't work when I click on it but I can reach the page if I copy/paste the URL shown. I see a trailing space in the href attribute. Maybe that's the problem?
Good catch on the link above - just fixed it.
Thanks for elaborating on your setup. Just a heads up: I've been told by MS representatives as recently as two weeks ago that the model you describe (Power BI free users being able to view content embedded in a third-party app) is being phased out and will stop working entirely sometime in mid-2018. The closest evidence I can find to support this in the MS documentation is here, under "Share content with Power BI FREE users outside PowerBI.com and embed in other SaaS applications": https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded-faq
However, since this is an ongoing change, it's possible you may get a different answer (in fact, I received a couple of conflicting reports before we finally found a method that worked for us). If they confirm the above, let me know and I'll share how we addressed the issue.
I'm going to wrap this up by clarifying my use case and explaining what I did to work around my issue. First of all, I'm following the "User Owns Data" scenario, or "embedding for your organization" depending on what documentation you're looking at. The goal is not to use a master account to authenticate, but rather for the end user to authenticate with his/her account and then be presented with the content that they are authorized to view. I'm building a custom portal to improve upon the user experience provided by powerbi.com, and adding metadata features in the process.
The main factor with my issue turned out to be the fact that I was opening a new browser window in order to display the embedded report/dashboard. I never discovered why that poses a problem, but I have successfully worked around the issue by instead displaying the embedded content in an overlay that takes up the full browser window. The only properties that I need to pass into the config object to the powerbi.embed function are type, accessToken, and embedUrl. I don't have to deal with embed tokens at all to make this work.
I will also mention that I had a very frustrating experience dealing with Microsoft tech support on this issue, so I'm happy to clarify anything about my solution for people that might stumble upon this post. I opened a support incident through my MSDN account, and ended up spending many hours over the course of several weeks providing diagnostic information to the Power BI product team. They really never did anything for me except ask me to jump through lots of hoops, which I did, and it never got me an answer to my question about why I got an error when embedding the content in a new browser window.