Power BI Designer API

[marco4]

Power BI Designer saves a local PBIX file, which can be a file to export data and data model – in other words, it’s a format that contains a complete semantic model. All the applications that today export data in several formats (CSV, Excel, XML), might provide a richer semantic model exporting a PBIX file. Many ISV/SI that have OLTP and other applications that stores data in some database, usually struggle to offer a compelling BI story to their customers. The smaller they are, the more they feel this pressure because probably the effort they can put in their custom software is minimal. Today these ISV/SI integrate their solution with external vendor technologies (QlikView is a common choice here). However, the cost of such a solution for the end user is not always appealing, and for this reason the MS partner ecosystem always look for components (charts and pivot tables) to integrate in their solutions. Providing them an easy and inexpensive way to produce PBIX files “ready to use” straight from their product/solution would provide several benefits: - Customers would have something ready to be uploaded to Power BI service - ISV/SI would be able to provide a BI solution integrated with MS ecosystem - ISV/SI can implement solutions like “send a PBIX file via mail every week to all the agents including only the data of their prospects/customers” - Today they already do that using the .CUB format, which can be consumed by both Excel and custom applications - Microsoft would increase the number of Power BI users very quickly - Small ISV/SI would be able to implement such integration very fast What I propose to do is, in descending order of importance: 1) Support Power BI Designer as a local engine with an API that can be used by anyone and officially support local connections by other programs (starting from Excel) - The API should provide the ability to create a data model and to populate it with data by just using API, without any manual interaction - Providing the ability to connect from other clients (today it is possible but not officially supported) would increase the adoption. 2) Document and “open” the PBIX file, so that it can be generated by anyone - I think that this is easy for the data model, but not for the data. - But without the data, this model would be not so useful, requiring a manual refresh to be populated. 3) Open source the Power BI Designer - Not really a priority in my opinion, but if the first two wouldn’t be possible, this one could be ok

[cd]

Good idea, I think it's also quite important, that the API should include a method for uploading the PBIX file to Power BI.

[teva_delar]

What's the status of this idea ? It's categorized in "hot ideas" but still hasn't gotten any official feedback.

[Patrick_imbaul3]

It's definetely the missing part, you got my vote.

[m_abergo]

I'm totally agree with this. What I want point out is to allow to change the data source connection with the API. Usually every ISV has a great number of customers and each of them as a specific istance of DB (ex. SQL Server)

[j_dejong1]

Great idea!!

[peter_njoka]

You have my vote!

[swapnil_aswale]

Hi, Would like to know if there is any update on above idea. Thanks.

[nicola_mondinel]

Yes. I'm a small business Microsoft Partner and my problems are perfectly described here: i cannot sell POWER BI SOLUTIONS because customers wants excel (for semplicity, usability and becouse they are used to) as frontend, they love Pivots, but i cannot use pbix as source or import the DATA MODEL and POWERQUERY queries . PowerBi is very beautiful but for now is relegated for make impact presentation or dashboards. BI project are more of that.

[isoquark]

Yes. Yes. Yes. 1000x Yes. I'm really having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that this has to even be a feature request. Having an SDK to manipulate the file format is such an obvious thing...

[marc_solomon1]

It's a "3 Vote" story for me. I would like to add more than just 3 of my votes to be honest! This feature is going to catapult Power BI Desktop onto millions of desktops as ISV's lead clients to adopt this amazing tool. Note for admin's: I believe this is a duplicate backlog item with https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/268152-developer-apis/suggestions/6856183-provide-api-library-to-create-local-pbix-files Can you close and reassign votes here?