Forum Discussion
Model Build Permissions AND Viewer Workspace Permissions to Create Report?
Hi arock-well
Yes, in most practical scenarios, especially when using Power BI Desktop, a user will likely need both Build permissions on the semantic model and Viewer permissions on the workspace to effectively create reports.- Build permission only (No Viewer access) → The user might not see the model in Power BI Desktop.
- Viewer access only (No Build permission) → The user can view reports but cannot create new ones from the model.
- Want access to the model without exposing the workspace? → Consider using Shared Dataset Access from another workspace.
If this response was helpful, please accept it as a solution and give kudos to support other community members
Hi arock-well,
Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Fabric Community.
Thank you rohit1991, Deku and ArwaAldoud for the prompt response.
As we haven’t heard back from you, we wanted to kindly follow up to check if the solution provided by the super user resolved your issue? or let us know if you need any further assistance.
If our super user response resolved your issue, please mark it as "Accept as solution" and click "Yes" if you found it helpful.
Thanks and regards,
Anjan Kumar Chippa
After further testing, it seems that applying Viewer permissions still does not allow connections to models.
However, if I grant Contributor permissions, it appears this does allow for that. This link has some footnotes that explain this: Roles in workspaces in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
However, footnote 10 says this:
10 Consuming data from a dataflow gen2 with the dataflow connector requieres Admin, Member or Contributor permissions. Viewer permissions is not sufficient and is not supported for consuming data from the dataflow gen2.
The problem with this is all my dataflows are Gen1, so this footnote is apparently wrong.
In any case, granting users Contributor roles is allowing them to have more permissions to a Workspace than we want to allow, such as being able to delete content in the Workspace.
I'm hoping that Microsoft can modify or add a role to simply only allow users to connect to semantic models and that's it.
