Deployment Pipeline Rules with CI/CD

[kylememe]

I'm looking at using deployment pipelines and Azure Devops to do a good setup of CI/CD for PowerBI paginated reports embedded in a customer facing app and the PowerBI APIs and Azure Devops pipelines comes real close to doing what I need it to do, but not quite.

We have 3 workspaces to deploy the reports through that match up with the powerbi deployment pipeline stages of dev, test, and prod. Each workspace should have a different data source for the reports to connect to (for dev data, test data, and prod data), and the deployment pipeline rules *should* allow me to handle that really well by switching the datasource as the report gets deployed to each stage. But in the CI/CD pipeline I'm using a service principal to authenticate and make the calls to the PowerBI APIs, as far as I can tell this means the service principal is the owner of the deployed report (to say the production stage) and I can't login as the service principal to setup deployment rules. If I login as my normal interactive user, I can't see any artifacts to apply rules to, since I don't own them, the service principal does. How can I setup deployment rules that will be applied as I move reports through the deployment stages using a Azure Devops CI/CD pipeline?

Am I missing something easy here? Are there any APIs to setup deployment rules?

Thanks!

[john_britto]

Is it not possible to have Deployment Rules for data pipelines?

[dmkblesser]

Hi @kylememe , I'm working on a similar project and run into the same issue as you mentioned in your post. I now try to update the datasoure after the reports are deployed. However, when I follow the instructions from the link:  Update Data Sources In Group,I got an error "message": "An error has occurred."

I'm also using a service principle. I'm wondering do you need to grant the access permission of the underlying datasource for service principle? Right now, my service principal has access to the report workspace, to the gateway of the datasource and to the powerbi pipeline. 

Really appreciate if you can help me on that!

[kylememe · Accepted solution]

Thanks. I was well aware of all the options for automating the deployment pipelines and how to integrate that with Azure Devops. What ended up solving my problem is the update data source API call at Update Data Sources In Group . After my Paginated Reports get deployed to the correct workspace, I run that API call against them to set the correct data source they should use, depending what workspace they are in.

[v-xiaosun-msft]

Hi @kylememe ,

To achieve continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) of content, many organizations use various automation tools, including Azure DevOps. Organizations that use Azure DevOps, can use the Power BI automation tool extension, which supports many of the deployment pipelines API operations.

Here are documents about leveraging the deployment pipelines Power BI REST APIs to integrate Power BI into your organization's automation process.

You can reference them:

Automate deployments with deployment pipelines API (preview) | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft P...

Automate your deployment pipeline, the Power BI Application lifecycle management (ALM) tool - Power ...

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ xiaosun

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