powerbi published report and authentication to SharePoint

[lfk32]

I have a case in which a team has a powerbi dahboard that pull data from many fexcel files stored on mulitple Sharepoint sites (in the samne tenant).  Right now the authenticatio nto sharepoin is using a regualr users name and password.  The issue is with MFA etc the crednetials need to be refreshed to get a new Oauth token every 14 days and it the perosn is on leave this also becimes a issue.

My first thought was Service principals however the compeny deveoping the dahsbaord claims the issue with Power Platform, including BI, and it’s SharePoint integration, is that it still does not support an Azure Service Principal as an auth method.

As they are asling for a generic account and remove all the seucifty options etc.  Usual stuff.

Firstly I cannot find any info on the service principal being supported or not.  These tools have bene around for many years seem to me this would have been something address.

Can anyone help point me to where this apparent lakc of support is documented or if this is not actuslly the fact and they can be used is ther ea guide on hwo to setup a SP and add this to a report when buiding it in PowerBi desktop?

Thanks. 

[tharunkumarRTK · Accepted solution]

@lfk32 

Power BI does support service principal authentication. Please checkout the below article.

https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/service-principal-support-to-connect-to-data-in-dataflo...

For your scenario, both sharepoint and web connectors support service principal so you can follow the below approach. 
1. When you are developing the report from desktop, you can continue using the individual user OAuth authentication.

2. Once you publish the report and dataset (semantic model), instead of autheticating with user accounds create a cloud connection and map your dataset with that connection. 

This way you can avoid the problem of periodic token expiration. Also you whoever is creating this connection can share it the team so that even if that is on leave, other teammates can use it.

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