Forum Discussion
Power BI Auto Login
Hi,
We have developed a Power BI report to display several daily and monthly KPIs. We want to display the report on large monitors in our manufacturing facility. One of our concerns is how to automatically launch the report after a reboot (i.e. computer updates, power failure etc.)
We've set up the user account to auto login on start up and we can set up a script to automatically launch powerbi.com in a browser after login, but is there a way to automatically login and display the desired report?
Thanks!
AUaero Just checking around the web it appears that you could script something to auto log in, but I'm not going to recommend anything as I've never done it and it deals with areas I'm unfamiliar with. If you can get a process to kick off and log in to Power BI, you can set a particular dashboard as your favorite and that will always show up after log in.. but I'm not aware of being able to navigate to a particular report.
If you have a report page, you could pin the report page to a dashboard and make that your favorite, which might get you close to what you want... no garauntee's though.
15 Replies
- AUaero
One way to do is to use Publish to web feature. That will give you a URL for your report that you can launch via script on computer restart and so you don't need to worry about login or anything. Obviously that feature makes your report available to anyone who has that link but it's upto you to pass that link to anybody.Ankit, thanks for your reply.
So there is no way to secure this data? I'm a little leery of publishing proprietary data to the public web and relying on security through URL obscurity.
Are there any alterantive solutions? Surely someone else has a had a similar requirement for a kiosk mode type application using Power BI.
Thanks!
AUaero Just checking around the web it appears that you could script something to auto log in, but I'm not going to recommend anything as I've never done it and it deals with areas I'm unfamiliar with. If you can get a process to kick off and log in to Power BI, you can set a particular dashboard as your favorite and that will always show up after log in.. but I'm not aware of being able to navigate to a particular report.
If you have a report page, you could pin the report page to a dashboard and make that your favorite, which might get you close to what you want... no garauntee's though.
Ankit, after further investigation it appears that publish to web does not work with pro content. My report is linked to my on-prem analysis services instance.
Any other ideas for how to use Power BI to publish KPIs in a kiosk mode?
Hi can you share how do you set up the user account to auto login on start up? We hope to use our application to auto fill in user's account and password to offload their need to remember 1 more account/pwd. Thank you.
Hi pyk,
If you're looking for help on setting a PC up to automatically login a user at startup, try here. If you're talking about automatically logging in to Power BI, the best I could do was make sure that the box was checked to remember the user's password when initially logging in. We've got a Powershell script that launches IE and navigates to the desired Power BI report, but this only works as long as a) you've checked the box to remember the password, and b) the user's password hasn't been changed.
Hello ,
I have one question here is, i have designed the report in the power bi desktop premium version.
Now i have published that report.
This report is to be shared to our client.
But they doesn't want to buy the license.
Is there any other option how then can login to APP.POWERBI.COM
and see the report without buying the license?
You could try using Power BI Embedded to embed the report in a public facing web page. You'll need a premium capacity for Power BI Embedded, though. If you have a Sharepoint Online subscription, embedding your Power BI content there might be an option as well.
There will be a cost involved somewhere. Either you'll pay it to set up capacity for embedding in client portal type scenario (maybe worth it if this is a recurring requirement for your clients and you can pass the cost along to them) or they'll just need to buy licenses for their own internal use.
AUaero , I am coming to this thread a few years late lol, but I am wondering if your siuation is similar enough to mine to help me out. I am trying to deplpoy Power BI dashboards to my digital signage in a manufactuirng environment, yet every 24 houts my PBI (microsoft account) session times out and demands I resign in. One thing I thought was to force my device to restart every night at 1 am, and upon restarting run this script to login and open the dashboard. What are your thoughts on this?
Furhtermore, I may need a edge browser or LINUX version of the code you shared for PBI open on startup.
Also, I am surprised at the general lack of community support for digital signage applications of Power BIAnonymous - I'm surprised this is still hard to do 6.5 years after I made this original post!
We actually gave up on trying to do this in a browser for digital signage. We ended up going with a digital signage solution. The nice thing about a solution like this is you can display other content in rotation with your Power BI data. Here are some options:
Power BI Digital Signage | What? Why? How? | TrouDigitalHow to Use PowerBI for Digital Signage Dashboards - (reachmedianetwork.com)
Microsoft Power BI on digital signage - valotalive
A couple of cautions, though:
1. A lot of vendors say they can do Power BI integration in digital signage. Some are better than others.
2. You'll probably need to purchase a Power BI embedded capacity or premium capacity to make it work.
One other option if you don't want to use Power BI Embedded is to purchase a Power BI Robots license. PBI Robots can create a screenshot of a report on a defined schedule and delivier that report to sharepoint, network share, etc. There are a lot more digital signage solutions that can display an image from a file share than there are that can sucessfully integrate live Power BI.
11 Options for Open Source Digital Signage (digitalsignagehub.org)
PowerBI Robots (powerbitiles.com)
Hope this helps!Thanks for the response. I had a feeling that a digital signage provider was going to be the best option going forward. I will look through the articles you mentioned... the one we are considering right now is ScreenCloud, which looks like its PBI integration is legit.
The power BI Robots idea is certainly novel to me, I would be a little concerned with how it may work with my refresh frequency demands (once every two minutes)... but I will check it out. Thanks again.
Hey everyone,
Wanted to chime in here, I just came across this. This is a huge problem within Power BI that has lasted for several years. I actually wrote my own Chrome extension previously to help people with this, but it was ultimately too limited and unreliable - all of them are.
I decided to write a custom digital signage/slideshow desktop app for Power BI called Displagent. It allows you to create custom slideshows from Power BI reports and Power BI dashboards and mix & match them. It uses a Power BI service account and an Azure App Registration to authenticate you to Microsoft, and it encrypts those credentials locally on your machine once you enter them (very safe from a security standpoint). There's no manual logins required, and no timeouts ever occur because it refreshes everything automatically. All you need is a Power BI Pro account, and a dedicated capacity is NOT required.
More relevant to this particular ticket, it has autolaunch built in. So on machine startup/reboot, Displagent will auto-open itself and auto-start to a specific slideshow that you can choose: a Report Slideshow, a Dashboard Slideshow, or a Compound Slideshow.
I have a lot of people in the manufacturing sector that sign up for the app and want to display it on TVs on shop floors or offices. Check it out if interested!
