Forum Discussion
Using a Dataflow connector with different credentials
Hi everyone, so Microsoft support have come back and have basically said that in order to do this, I either need to use an on-prem gateway .... for an Azure source... I'm not sure they fully understood the ticket, but ok.
OR use the Dataflow Gen 2 instead of Gen 1. I don't have a license for the Gen 2, so that isn't going to work for me and I don't know if I'll be able to get the company to pay for it.
I have been looking at the composite models and I may have a way around it with multiple semantic models - one model for each tenant, and then combining those potentially. It won't be a 'clean' way of doing it, but I think it might just work - because I can set the credentials for each semantic model using the method GilbertQ mentioned above - creating the creds first.
Hi zantarel
What happens if you first go and create the connection as a cloud data source, which you will then allow you to pick it as a source when interacting with the different azure subscriptions?
Create and share cloud data sources in the Power BI service - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
Oh, well now, this is a game changer... I didn't know you could do this and I will have to experiment. I am in a position where I chose dataflows as my avenue to get Azure data into PowerBI because I want to be able to push those dataflows off to other teams - i.e. the backup data can go to the platform team, the list of resources would go to security and the CMDB team etc. but it looks like I can make the connection available to different semantic models which is interesting ... Thanks for this - I'll go and see if I can get this working!
Edit: This didn't work... so this gives the same behaviour whether I used two dataflows or connected the ARG to the semantic model directly. When I go to edit the semantic model to switch it over to the connection as demonstrated in the link you gave me, there's only one ARG connector. I only see one of these:
even though there's two queries in the model. So I can still assign the connection to use one set of the credentials, but it'll use the same credential for both queries.
However, this has given me the idea that I can create multiple semantic models - one for each tenant, using the ARG connection for each tenant I've created this way, and the write PowerAutomate flows to scrape the data from each powerBI report. It's horrid and clunky and nasty... but doable. In theory.
I have reached out to a few people at MS through my company to see if I can just confirm there is no better way. This is crazy to me - it seems like such a simple thing to be able to do ... !