Create a PBIX file via API

[Anonymous]

I would like to programmatically create a pbix file from scratch or load an empty file with data I extract from my NoSQL database. In my use case, a business analyst or admin would write XQUERY to generate a result set and landed on the filesystem for use by PowerBI. I can do this today by creating CSV files, but I would like to forgo the critical path conversion and have the export job create the PBIX file. Is this possible?

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous,

It is not possible to create PBIX file via API as you describe, an similar idea about this issue has been submitted in the link below, please vote it up.
https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/7345565-power-bi-designer-api

Regards,
Lydia

[pedrokarneiro]

Thanks for the direction, Lydia. That approach is historically very important for us developers in general. I can't believe that it does not exist yet in the Power BI environment / ecosystem.

By the way, that creation on the fly was very common in Crystal Reports back in the 2000s' when we used to create CR files from our VB6 code. Will there be it is possible to work with the DLLs like we did it for creating the CR files?

🙂👍

[otravers]

You can see the current Power BI REST API documentation here, and to this day there is nothing to create a dataset:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/datasets/update-refresh-schedule

It's a surprising omission compared to Tableau who added their Hyper columnar engine years after PowerPivot/Power BI had VertiPaq, but does offer the Hyper API.