Forum Discussion
Options to source data from remote web host for Power BI online report
1. There isn't direct link but it comes with automatic refresh ie your dataset in powerbi wll automatically refresh approx every hour from the file on sharepoint.
2. Using PowerBI Rest API you can add rows to the tables in your dataset ie you should already have a dataset. Files on remote server are your data sources and you can work out a way to connect to those files from your application and push that data into dataset in power bi. PowerBI Rest API lets you connect to dataset in your power bi account from your application. Therefore if you have a method of connecting to data source (in your case files on remote server) sorted already then you can use REST APIs to push that data into tables in datasets in power bi.
ankitpatira thanks that helped. I didn't see the automatic refresh feature in Power BI online before. The Power BI API as you describe it sounds very promising. Will check that out too.
Updated to include link to documentation on how to refresh data source from csv file in Sharepoint:
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-refresh-csv-file-onedrive/