Query on custom connectors

[AkankshaAcharya]

Hi team,

I have a custom connector in Power BI and would like to distinguish between calls from Power BI desktop from Power BI service.

Now my questions are :

A) Is it possible to distinguish calls from within the connector code in the first place? And if yes, how can we achieve it?

B) Would Extension.CurrentApplication be helpful in this task? I would appreciate if anyone can share an example or documentation of this field/function and what exactly does it return, as I couldn't find anything useful online so far.

Any suggestions or leads would be appreciated. Thanks!

[lbendlin]

Power BI service has no idea how to handle your custom connectors. This is all delegated to the gateway cluster members. These gateway cluster members behave like headless instances of Power BI Desktop.  As far as I know there is no way to determine which entity (your PC or a gateway) is requesting the Power Query code for the custom connector.  What you could assume is that the operating system of the requestor is Windows 10 or 11 for the desktop, and Windows Server for the gateway.

[AkankshaAcharya]

How can I get the operating system of the requestor in the connector? Is there a function that I could use in power query?

[lbendlin]

In the vast majority of cases the requestor will be the Azure service. Not sure how that will help you.