automated Email Delivery of not-paginated reports

[Coffeehouse45]

Hey All, 

I have a specific business need to generate a PDF of a few reports on our Power BI Report Server and then email those pdfs once per day. 

My issue is that the reports are NOT paginated reports. Power BI Report Server only supports subscriptions (automated email delivery of reports) for paginated reports. The report dev's do not want to maintain two versions of a report, paginated and regular. 

Has anyone found a workaround to this sort of issue? Or have any ideas on how to make this happen? 

[v-venuppu]

Hi @Coffeehouse45 ,

I wanted to check whether if you had a chance to raise a support ticket and resolve this issue? If so, please consider sharing the solution in the forum,this will help other members find the answer more easily.

Thank you.

[v-venuppu]

Hi @Coffeehouse45 ,

As the workarounds didn't helped,I recommend submitting your issue through Microsoft's official Support Ticket channel, such as the:How to create a Fabric and Power BI Support ticket - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Thank you.

[v-venuppu]

Hi @Coffeehouse45 ,

I wanted to check if you had the opportunity to review the information provided and resolve the issue..?Please let us know if you need any further assistance.We are happy to help.

Thank you.

[v-venuppu]

Hi @Coffeehouse45 ,

You are not missing anything – the PBIRS GUI only supports PBIX download, so there isn’t a built-in PDF option there. However, the REST API does support rendering reports to PDF (or Excel/Word), for example:

http://<PBIRS-Server>/reports/api/v2.0/Reports({ReportID})/Export?format=PDF

You can automate that call to save and email the PDF on a schedule. If you don’t want to code, Power Automate Desktop can also record the export > save > email steps as already suggested earlier.

Thank you.

[Coffeehouse45]

Hey v-venuppu,
Thank you for the response. I don't see the api call that you listed in the Power BI Report Server api documentation. I do see it in the Power BI Service documentation. I think you might be pulling from the wrong documentation. 

Also, Power Automate won't work here. When one downloads report from PBIRS, it is in .pbix file format. The only option to use power automate would be to somehow screenshot the report and then download that screenshot and convert to pdf. There's likely a lot of things wrong with trying to make that work. 

Let me know your thoughts. I appreciate your time!

[v-venuppu]

Hi @Coffeehouse45 ,

Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Fabric Community.

Thank you @Greg_Deckler for the prompt response.

Power BI Report Server can’t directly email non-paginated reports, but you can still make it happen by automating the “export as PDF” and “send email” steps yourself.

The basic idea:

Use PBIRS’s built-in REST API to tell the server: “Export this report as a PDF.”Save that PDF somewhere on your network or server.Use an email script (or even Outlook automation) to send that PDF to whoever needs it.Schedule the whole process to run once a day using Windows Task Scheduler.

If you don’t want to touch code, you can also:

Use Power Automate Desktop to “pretend” you’re clicking the Export button in the browser, then email the file.

Or run Power BI Desktop RS on a server, export to PDF there, and send it out.

 you don’t have to make a paginated version of the report - you just automate the PDF download + email yourself, outside of PBIRS’s built-in subscription system.

Thank you.

[Coffeehouse45]

Hey @v-venuppu, 

I don't see a specific api command in the Power BI report Server documentation that would download/export the power bi report as a PDF. Maybe I'm missing it. Could you point out the correct command to use? 

Also, concerning the Power Automate solution you proposed, the PBIRS GUI only allows you to download the file in .pbix format. Am I missing something, or is there a way to download it as PDF? 

Thank you in advance!


Thanks!

[Greg_Deckler]

@Coffeehouse45 Maybe? Export and email a report with Power Automate - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

[Coffeehouse45]

Based on my internet searches, Using Power Automate (cloud based, O365) won't work as it doesn't have a way to integrate with Power BI Report Server. I should mention that I've not used Power Automate before, so if there is another solution using this tool, then I'm all ears! 

Thanks!