Power BI Paginated Report deployment via Azure Devops Release Pipelines, REST APIs

[markplace]

We're trying to set-up Azure Devops Build and Release Pipelines for our Power BI Paginated Reports. We need the release pipeline to support deployment to our Test and two Prod environments.

We able to retrieve RDLs from our Git Repo and publish to the target workspaces. Then we need to modify the connection strings for each target environment. Using Azure PowerShell, we're able to authenticate as a Power BI Service Principle and change the connection string Server and Database names.

In order for this to work, we need to take over each report:

"groups/$workspaceId/reports/$reportId/Default.TakeOver"

and then

"groups/$workspaceId/reports/$reportId/Default.UpdateDatasources".

The updated connection can be verified through

"groups/$workspaceId/reports/$reportId/Datasources".

However when we try to run the report in the portal it fails with a "Could not connect to datasource" error. After going to the report management page and choosing "Take over" the report works fine.

Has anyone run into this before?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

You stated you were able to "to retrieve RDLs from our Git Repo and publish to the target workspaces".

Could you please explain how you were able to do this as I have tried to deploy .rdl files and have failed. I deploy .pbix files using a Power BI Actions extension in Azure DevOps but it doesn't support .rdl files.

Would greatly appreicate the help. 

[LeeBenjamin]

Hi @markplace 
For #1 + #2 you can use our import APIs: Imports - REST API (Power BI Power BI REST APIs) | Microsoft Learn
As for #3 - It is not supported yet but is on our backlog. In case you're using multiple prod environments just for the purpose of seperate content to different audiences, please check out our Apps new release of the option to create different views for the same WS (app):
Announcing Public Preview of Multiple Audiences for Power BI Apps | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Micros...

BR,

Lee

[v-yalanwu-msft]

Hi, @markplace ;

You can check if these related post can is useful to you.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/deployment-pipelines-troubleshooting

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Yalan Wu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[markplace]

Thanks Yalan,

We have a few issues with using Power BI Deployment Pipelines:

1. We prefer to source our artifacts (PBX and RDL files) from our GIT repo.  How can this be done?
2. We would like the all the artifacts from the repo to be automatically deployed into each workspace.  PBI Deployment Pipelines require manual intervention for each report to configure the correct datasources. Of course this wouldn't be needed if Paginated Reports supported Share Datasources for each Workspace.
3. We have multiple Production Workspaces. This is not supported.

While maybe better than nothing, at present Power BI Deployment Pipelines seems more like a kid's toy than an enterprise-class solution. Just my two cents.

TIA,

Mark