Marco Russo on 27 Mar 2015 16:20:23
Power BI Designer saves a local PBIX file, which can be a file to export data and data model – in other words, it’s a format that contains a complete semantic model. All the applications that today export data in several formats (CSV, Excel, XML), might provide a richer semantic model exporting a PBIX file.
Many ISV/SI that have OLTP and other applications that stores data in some database, usually struggle to offer a compelling BI story to their customers. The smaller they are, the more they feel this pressure because probably the effort they can put in their custom software is minimal.
Today these ISV/SI integrate their solution with external vendor technologies (QlikView is a common choice here). However, the cost of such a solution for the end user is not always appealing, and for this reason the MS partner ecosystem always look for components (charts and pivot tables) to integrate in their solutions.
Providing them an easy and inexpensive way to produce PBIX files “ready to use” straight from their product/solution would provide several benefits:
- Customers would have something ready to be uploaded to Power BI service
- ISV/SI would be able to provide a BI solution integrated with MS ecosystem
- ISV/SI can implement solutions like “send a PBIX file via mail every week to all the agents including only the data of their prospects/customers” - Today they already do that using the .CUB format, which can be consumed by both Excel and custom applications
- Microsoft would increase the number of Power BI users very quickly - Small ISV/SI would be able to implement such integration very fast
What I propose to do is, in descending order of importance:
1) Support Power BI Designer as a local engine with an API that can be used by anyone and officially support local connections by other programs (starting from Excel)
- The API should provide the ability to create a data model and to populate it with data by just using API, without any manual interaction
- Providing the ability to connect from other clients (today it is possible but not officially supported) would increase the adoption.
2) Document and “open” the PBIX file, so that it can be generated by anyone
- I think that this is easy for the data model, but not for the data.
- But without the data, this model would be not so useful, requiring a manual refresh to be populated.
3) Open source the Power BI Designer
- Not really a priority in my opinion, but if the first two wouldn’t be possible, this one could be ok
Administrator on 21 Oct 2022 02:41:46
Update 10/17: This is now in our upcoming roadmap and we will share more details in the coming months. Mo (Note: this item is similar to the GIT item)
Hi everyone. There are some really interesting ideas in this thread, thanks for your vocal support about it! We'll consider it for the future along with other suggestions and plans. Thanks!
- Comments (97)
- Merged Idea (4)
RE: Power BI Designer API
Can only support this. It would help in so many ways.
RE: Power BI Designer API
Please do it as soon as possible. It will help in lot of migration automation to Power BI from various tools.
RE: Power BI Designer API
Being able to unravel the meta data and data sources used in a PBIX so it can be promoted to a "supported dataset" would be really useful
RE: Power BI Designer API
Please release as soon as possible! Thank you!
RE: Power BI Designer API
We are an ISV that syndicates billions of public data points that can be blended in any combination. So we have to have a "push" system that gets data into the PBIX format without a file based intermediary. This approach seems spot on to support that concept.
RE: Power BI Designer API
This will be very helpfull
RE: Power BI Designer API
I asked the similar 18 months ago, can I programmatically create a pbix and inject my own M script into it? This is probably a hack around.
Now I vote here. It would support the same purpose if there are APIs.
In my automation pipelines, I generate data in multiple stages, the paths/outcome will be very dynamic, a fixed power BI template won't work.
This will be a killer feature.
RE: Power BI Designer API
Will, you provided a "consider ir for the future" comment in April 2015 and we are now in January 2017. This facility is essential read fundamental for moving ISVs from Tableau and Qlik. It is the game changer as apps can be delivered by the ISV community which is where the market is going for BI
RE: Power BI Designer API
It doesn't look like this will happen so like Karish said below, why not open source the PBIX format.
RE: Power BI Designer API
Great concept, but this (almost) Top 20 idea seems to have been Under Review for nearly 18 months. I appreciate it's a huge bucket of work with some hairy security issues, but the strategic value to enterprises, ISVs (and Microsoft?) must be huge for maintainability, portability, analysability etc. - e.g. check which .PBIXs and dashboards use which data sources/visualisations etc. (via Power BI?!), programatically update related .PBIXs to reflect a change in a master data source, basic source control, clone (common) best-practice visuals, etc etc.