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Anonymous
Not applicable

Some embedded tiles doesn't load, others load fine

Hello folks,

 

I wonder if I am missing something, but I cannot make all my reports and their tiles work embedding into my web application. I use the embed tile sample project from Git Hub, and everything seems to work fine. Except that one report's tiles load properly embedded into the iframe, others don't. When it doesn't work, the loading indicator circle is spinning in an infinite loop. There is no error message, nothing. The postActionLoadTile function is triggered by the onload of the iframe, I pass the access token, width, height, action: loadTile just as provided in the demo project. And still, for some reports it works, for others it doesn't.

 

I revised all the possible settings and configurations of the reports, and I couldn't find anything that made a difference.

I even created a plain simple dataset and report, but embedding that doesn't work either.

 

So I'm puzzled what am I doing wrong, or there is a bug in the system. I wonder if anybody has run into the same, or is it a known issue?

 

Cheers,

Tamás

16 REPLIES 16
vpat
Regular Visitor
Anonymous
Not applicable

Hello vpat,

 

I checked you posts on the linked forum, but for me it doesn't seem to be related. The subject of this thread is the embedded tiles not loading at all. Regardless of the visualizations on them. Out of the box visuals with the simplest dataset don't work as embedded tiles. 😞

Hi vidotom, can you please double check the type of the tile you are embeding. Unfortunatly at this moment we don't support embeding of model, workbook, and report tiles. If this is regular visual based tile, please let us know, so we can further investigate.

Hope this helps,

Irina

Anonymous
Not applicable

Hello guys,

 

Indeed, it turned out that my new reports that don't work were report tiles. Individual visuals from those report work fine. So now I need to redesign the way the tiles are embedded into my application, but at least I can make them work.

 

However I didn't find any sign of the limitation of the tile types mentioned anywhere. Can you please point me to the documentation of the supported tile types? It would be important to know wheter the remaining type of tiles are going to be supported in the future, or we have to stick to those available right now.

 

Thanks,

Tamás

Currently Report, Model tiles are not supported. In a process of adding this information to the documentation.

Sorry for the inconvenience, Irina  

Anonymous
Not applicable

Hi Irina,

 

I wonder if you could share any insights on the roadmap of the various tiles currently not supported to embed. It would be great if we could have a hint by when are they going to be supported if ever. At least approximately, such as a quarter would be appreciated.

 

Cheers,

Tamás

Hi Tamás, we are usually not sharing the dates and just send anoncements when ready:)

 

I can say that very soon we will return empty embed URL for the tiles that we are not supporting, so you can skip them in your application.

 

Can you please explain your scenario? I would assume that you are not blocked by not embeding the model/dataset tiles (they are kind of useless), report tiles are also not so interesting in the embed scenario (IMHO) because you can embed the whole report using report embeding and get interactive experience.

 

Thank you,

Irina

Anonymous
Not applicable

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

Anonymous
Not applicable

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

Anonymous
Not applicable

Hi folks,

 

I debugged a little bit of the issue, and found where the error comes from:

 

The iframe of the embedded Power BI tile has an unhandled JavaScript error in the powerbivisualrenderer.js file. In the embeddingRenderTileById function it runs an AJAX get request to get the tile data, and its success event handler is run - so far so good. The result of the request is a JSON object, which is parsed and sent to the renderTitles function. This function parses the configuration data of the tiles, and throws an unhandled exception as the config property of the tile object is undefined.

 

So I took a look at this object and found that quite a few important properties are missing for those tiles, which fail to get rendered:

config

tileDataBinaryBase64Encoded

tileDataUpdatedTime

Here is a screeen shot from the developer toolbar from another request, when the tile was successfully loaded. When it fails, the highlighted items are missing. Then the PBI code attempts to use them and obviously it throws an error.

bug.png

 

So no error is thrown by Power BI, but an unhandled JavaScript exception is thrown. The data of the tile is not returned by the REST API call. I'm puzzled. It seems to be a bug in Power BI.

 

Any idea?

Anonymous
Not applicable

And just to add some salt to the situation, I found that none of the recently created tiles work for me. None. I created a few new ones from scratch for a brand new account, they don't work either. I wonder if there is anybody who has a recently created tile working when embedded.

 

Can anyone confirm?

Hello, I did not manage to reproduce your issue. Here are the steps I took.

 

Anonymous
Not applicable

Hello algattik,

 

Thank you for your help too. As you can see above, the issue turned out to be related to the type of tile being embedded. My solution works fine with the visual tiles, but it fails using report type tiles.

Yeah, I can confirm.  I've been beating my head against a wall with this.  I've been trying to embed tiles into a UWP app and it's been working perfectly for the single sample tile I can find on the Internet and not working for anything I create . . . .

Can anyone *PLEASE* give me access to some old/pre-bug non-confidential samples?  I desperately need them for a sample program.  Thanks!

Anonymous
Not applicable

It is good to know that this bug doesn't occur only for me. It would be great to hear something about its fixing. If it is really generic as it looks, then it makes this feature of Power BI only a ghost. And completely useless...

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