PowerBI report server publishing

[jsmithers]

Hi,

What is the guidence for using expressions/variables for the connection strings to data sources. We have two challenges to overvcome to make sure the publishing of models works.

1) Data sources exist behind a proxy as per the report server. So the domain name used by the client to create the report is different to the one the report server uses for connections. We cannot use shortnames to resolve this as the domain zone lookup in our company prohibits this.

2) Our path to live goes through non production environments that use different domain names

I do not want to ask our dashboard buildings to go in after a publish and manually change the connection string for a data source.

Thanks

[luisrh]

The way to do this is to ensure your datasources are embedded data sources -  after that you can create your connectionstring thru an expression.  One common way is to pass info necessary for it thru hidden parameters -

From a security standpoint I would ensure those params are hashed and your functions in the SSRS side manage unmangling the passed parameters used for connectionstring building.

[Flybook-AzureAd]

I am looking for the same thing. I don't want the dashboard designers to design against production data (they should be using staging) but the published report should use production without the designer having to know the produciton data connection string. I'd be interested to see if you solved this? 

Thanks.