sharing dataflows - only via member/contributor permission ?

[frano72]

Hi, I've been following the best practice guidance of separating ingestion from transformation for dataflows.

So i'm ready to share the dataflow to business users and keep with the "data reuse" theme of dataflows.

Do you think i coudl find any guidance on how to actually do this ?

This article shows how to connect to it from Desktop but doesn't cover the precedent step of how you were provisioned access.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-connect-dataflows

From my testing, it seems you need to provide people Contributor/Member/Admin to the workspace with the dataflow.  If you choose the lowest permission Contributor - then they can't edit the dataflow BUT they can take over ownership and change the scheduling !  Not Good.

I just want people to be able to connect to the dataflow.

Have I missed anything ?

[nickyvv · Accepted solution]

To access a dataflow you indeed need at least Contributor rights to the workspace.

I just tested this: With the Viewer role you do have access to the dataflow in Power BI Desktop, but you can't see the dataflow in the workspace.

In my opinion you can't edit a dataflow unless you created it yourself. That has to do with the access to the Data Lake folders that have been created:

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[frano72]

Thanks Nicky !

Not sure what i did wrong in my initial testing, but did it again and it was as you say.

Viewer gives them rights to connect to dataflows from Power BI Desktop.

Perfect - exactly what I wanted cleared up.

I still think its a bit strange that I couldn't find any MS arcticles or guidance that specifically covers this pont of how to provide access to dataflows !  Maybe it was meant to be really obvious and no guidance was needed !