Some embedded tiles doesn't load, others load fine

Hi sgheysens,

Everything being rendered is a tile in Power BI. The smallest unit is the "Visual" type tile. E.g. a pie chart, or a matrix, or a table, etc. Then you can put one or multiple of them on to a tab of a report. That makes a "Report" tile when you are about to embed a tab of a report.

When you are embedding a visual tile, then you don't have the rest of the UI, but the visual itself. But you can also embed the whole report, or a tab of it as well, then the UI may be different. For embedding a single tab, it will look the same, but for embedding the whole report e.g. the filters will show too.

In your case I suppose that you retrieve the URL to report type tiles, which explains why the iframe fails to render them. If you switch to an individual visual tile, then it will work. But with report tile it is not supported (yet).

I hope this explanation helps.

Cheers,

Tamás

Hi Irina,

Thanks for the info. Empty embed URLs for the not supported tiles is a great help, especially if they would be accompanied with a flag in the tile description indicating that it is not supported. If the URL is simply empty, then how would the developer know why? I will know it now, but the rest of the community might not have an idea and would assume it is a bug or something else.

The business scenario in our case is the following:

Interactive tiles are needed, but typically only one tab of a report. And the page/report level filters should not be available to the user running the report. We need to pre-set the filters (query string parameter at the end of the embed URL), and we don't want the users to be able to clear / modify them. The filters would be generated in the web app based on complex circumstances coming from the app. E.g. the organizational unit of the user combined with some other metadata - determined either based on the user context or criteria set in the web app - would end up in a number of filters for the report, which we would set for the user instead of asking him to set the same manually one by one in Power BI. We could define different reports for these presets too, but that would be impossible to maintain with large number of users.

This is primarily due to security reasons (kinda row level security), but also for eas of use.

Performance: embedding a tile is more lightweight than embedding a report. In our experience tiles load faster than reports. 

Maintenance: we would have a few large reports with lots of tabs defining individual reports. We would maintain them centrally as single entities, then embed the necesary selected tabs of these reports into the web application based on the actual need. Some cases we would embed only one tab, some other case 3-4, some other cases a different set of tabs.

So at the end we would embed report type tiles instead of visual type tiles. This way we would have a clean and minimalistic user interface, where the users can focus only on the report itself, and the filters / other tabs of the report won't be displayed at all. That would be the ideal scenario.

Hi Vidotom,

When you say "Visual" type tiles vs Report tiles, can you clarify what you mean? Are Visual tiles the ones with static content (the dashboard tiles with and image/video/text) and report tiles the ones with data?

I'd like to embed tiles with live data that exist in reports, then are pinned in particular dashboards. My API calls are successfully returning embed URLs for both of the types of tiles I mentioned above, but they won't load when I generate the iframes for them.

Thanks,

Stephen