Navigation best practices

[Anonymous]

Let's say we have 10 manufacturing sites.

I want to design the app navigation so that users can click into their manufacturing site and it will load a report that filters for that manufacturing site.

But when we publish a report, it only adds that single report into the menu.

How can I add a filter to that navigation item? I saw there is a way to add a "link" but then I get problems asking the user to "signin" all the time.

What's the best practise here? How can we make 1 file but publish many different reports filtered in different ways into the power bi service and have all our users (which are all on Teams) be able to access them seamlessly?

[v-yueyunzh-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi, @Anonymous 

Hi, according to your question, here is my answer:

(1) Currently, only apps can create corresponding navigation bars on Power BI Service, and jump to report and dashboard.

(2) I checked relevant materials, and there is currently no function that can create unified titles and endings. Titles and endings need to be created manually. If you want to achieve report unification.

You can refer to the following documents:    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/desktop-report-themes

(3) Power BI Desktop is a report development tool, and Power BI Service is a cooperative development tool. We can publish our report developed on Desktop to Service, or download the .pbix file corresponding to the report in Power BI Serive. Then republish after developing on Power BI Desktop. We can also create multiple workspaces for different versions or different sites of our projects for collaboration and development.

Best Regards,

Aniya Zhang

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[v-yueyunzh-msft]

Hi, @Anonymous 

According to your questions, here are my answers:

(1) In Power BI, app is a way to bundle and share report and Dashboard. Currently, you cannot add filters in the Navigation of app, but you can use "Link" and enter the corresponding Url to jump to the corresponding report Or other web pages, you can also use "Section" to create groups to manage the navigation bar.

(2) When creating an app, you can select shared users, and these users need to log in to Power BI Service to view the app.

(3) Publishing to Service in Desktop will generate only one dataset and one report, and include all pages in the report. If you want to generate other reports based on this dataset, you need to connect this dataset in Dektop to create a report to publish or republish.

You can refer to the following documentation:  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/collaborate-share/service-create-distribute-apps

If you want different users to view different reports, you can create multiple apps and configure different Navigation to jump to different report pages.

If this method does not solve your problem, you can describe your needs in detail so that we can better analyze the problem for you.

Best Regards,

Aniya Zhang

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly

[Anonymous]

Thank you @v-yueyunzh-msft, a few more questions... I'm still wondering broadly about a few things.

We have several people working on different power bi desktop files, about 6 people. So I'm wondering how we can all collaborate to the same app. What we're doing now is publishing our data+report to a workspace, then put that report into the navigation of the app. This has a problem though that we want the navigation to have an item for each manufacturing site. So what we end up doing is making 10 files for each report and for each manufacturing site. This duplicates data and also becomes hard to publish changes as we have to edit each file everytime we publish.

My questions are:

1. Besides the app navigation what are way to build a navigation to multiple reports all in the same workspace?

2. Is there a way to create a common header and footer for each of our reports? Can we include some common code or file that will make our multiple reports more uniform?