US Customs ACE reporting as web data source?

[Diana2022]

Hi- has anyone successfully connected to the US Customs ACE reporting as a direct query web data source for PowerQuery?   I'd like to avoid downloading reports and then importing if at all possible.

[v-sshirivolu]

Hi @Diana2022 ,
Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft fabric community.
Based on our expertise and Microsoft’s documentation, the US Customs ACE reporting site does not currently offer native support for direct web queries like APIs or OData feeds. However, you can efficiently work around this by downloading reports to a local or cloud folder—such as OneDrive or SharePoint—and then connecting Power BI to that location using Power Query. This approach enables reliable auto-refresh when hosted in the cloud.

If you discover that the ACE system offers APIs (even though they aren’t publicly documented), you can leverage Power Query’s Web connector. Should you identify such an endpoint, I’m ready to help you set it up for seamless integration.

Here are some useful links:

Power Query Web Connector

Import data from a folder with multiple files

Regards,
Sreeteja.

[Diana2022]

Ok, thank you.  My root question really was whether anyone has successfully used ACE reporting as a web data source or the website just doesn't allow that.   I've never used a website as a data source before, have read MS documentation on it, but it can be helpful to know if someone has successfully done it before.

[v-sshirivolu]

Hi @Diana2022 
Thank you for the clarification!

To the best of our knowledge and based on community discussions, there are no confirmed cases where users have successfully connected to the ACE reporting site directly via web data sources in Power Query. This likely indicates that the site doesn’t expose data in a format that Power BI can consume directly (like APIs, JSON, or structured HTML tables).

[lbendlin]

What's their URL?  Do they provide API documentation?

[lbendlin]

Web connections are never Direct Query, they are always only in Import Mode.

Direct Query requires the data source to support some sort of query language like SQL