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thuetten
Helper I
Helper I

Shared Dataset RLS Not Carrying Through to Other Dataset

I've published a shared dataset that I'd like to use as the RLS for all of our other PowerBI reports. It just contains the user's email address and the department(s) they have access to, and RLS is set up on it.

 

I've connected it to one of our existing reports, and made sure all my permissions are in place. When I test it with one user who should only have access to one department, I've realized that RLS is working on the shared dataset, but not on the imported dataset that is specific to this report. If the user opens a department slicer that was created on the shared dataset, they only see deparment 8 (accurate). When they open a department slicer that was created on the report-specific dataset, they see all departments. I know the relationship between the datasets is correct, because filtering on the shared dataset department filters the report correctly. 

 

Is this just a limitation of Power BI, where RLS on shared datasets does not carry through to relationships? 

2 REPLIES 2
GilbertQ
Super User
Super User

Hi @thuetten 

 

Can you confirm that the RLS is working as expected. Typically RLS does use relationships to work.

 

I would suggest testing with this blog post from Kasper to make sure you can understand how it works for your requirement.

 

Power BI Desktop Dynamic security cheat sheet - Kasper On BI





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Power BI Blog

If I import the security dataset into my report as opposed to connecting to the shared one, RLS works as expected. The only difference between what I'm doing and in that article is that I have his 3 tables combined into one - users and their groups they have access to. So my relationship is many-to-many, which works if I have it imported into the pbi file.

 

Is there a limitation on that not working with direct query on the shared dataset? The only setting I can't enable that he did was the "apply security filter in both directions" - but again, I don't need that enabled on the imported version for it to work either. 

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