Business Intelligence tools were designed to visualize and understand more easily big data. Their purpose is to understand trends and insights from your data so that you can make tactical and strategic business decisions.

There are several BI tools available on the market such as: Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Dundas, Sisense or Zoho Analytics.

Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses.

Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize and discover what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

The basic structure:

Power BI also comes with a list of powerful components that can be used to model the data: Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, Power Map, Power Q&A, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Website, Power BI Mobile Apps

Microsoft Power BI comes with two SDK capabilities:

1. Integration with your back-end application using Microsoft.PowerBI.Api Nuget package.
2. Embed your reports in view or edit mode using Javascript SDK. You can use their Embedded Playground to check all his capabilities.

Let's see some examples on how we can connect and interact with Power BI API:

              
      public class PowerBIDemo
      {
     	    public async Task< PowerBIClient > GetPowerBiClient()
      	    {
    	        var tokenCredentials = new TokenCredentials(ACCESS_TOKEN, "Bearer");
            	return new PowerBIClient(https://api.powerbi.com/, tokenCredentials);
            }

            public async Task< Report > GetReport(string workspaceId, string reportId)
            {
               PowerBIClient client = await GetPowerBiClient();
               return await client.Reports.GetReportInGroupAsync(new Guid(workspaceId), new Guid(reportId));
            }

            public async Task< Dataset > GetDataset(string workspaceId, string datasetId)
            {
               PowerBIClient client = await GetPowerBiClient();
               return await client.Datasets.GetDatasetInGroupAsync(new Guid(workspaceId), datasetId);
            }

            public async Task< Report > CloneReport(Guid workspaceId, Guid reportId, Guid newWorkspaceId, string datasetId)
            {
               PowerBIClient client = await GetPowerBiClient();
               return await client.Reports.CloneReportInGroupAsync(
                    workspaceId,
                    reportId,
                    new CloneReportRequest
                    {
                        Name = "Report_Name",
                        TargetWorkspaceId = newWorkspaceId,
                        TargetModelId = datasetId
                    });
            }

            public async Task RebindReportToNewDataset(string workspaceId, Report report, string newDatasetId)
            {
		PowerBIClient client = await GetPowerBiClient();
            	await client.Reports.RebindReportInGroupAsync(
                    new Guid(workspaceId),
                    report.Id,
                    new RebindReportRequest
                    {
                        DatasetId = newDatasetId
                    });
            }

            public async Task ImportPbixFile(Stream fileStream, string workspaceId, string templateName)
            {
            	PowerBIClient client = await GetPowerBiClient();
                Import import = await client.Imports.PostImportWithFileAsyncInGroup(new Guid(workspaceId), fileStream, templateName);
            }

      }       
              
              

With the JavaScript API offered by Power BI you can manage reports, navigate to pages in a report, filter a report, and handle embedding events. It is important to mention that the Javascript API offer much more options to access the pages, visuals ,filters, fields or tables then the Nuget Package.

To find all available capabilities and APIs we can access the Microsoft Power BI Embedded Playground on which we have all available types of APIs and functionalities offered by Javascript SDK. There is no need to write any code to test these APIs.

The code below shows us how we can embed a report both in view and edit mode.

              

	// Get models. models contains enums that can be used.
	var models = window['powerbi-client'].models;

	// We give All permissions to demonstrate switching between View and Edit mode and saving report.
	var permissions = models.Permissions.All;

	var config = {
	    type: 'report',
	    tokenType: tokenType == '0' ? models.TokenType.Aad : models.TokenType.Embed,
	    accessToken: txtAccessToken,
	    embedUrl: txtEmbedUrl,
	    id: txtEmbedReportId,
	    permissions: permissions,
	    //viewMode: models.ViewMode.Edit, //by default the embedding type is view mode. If we uncomment this the report will be embedded in edit mode. 
	    settings: {
	      panes: {
	        filters: {
	          visible: true
	        },
	        pageNavigation: {
	          visible: true
	        }
	      }
	    }
	};

	// Get a reference to the embedded report HTML element
	var embedContainer = $('#embedContainer')[0];

	// Embed the report and display it within the div container.
	var report = powerbi.embed(embedContainer, config);

	// Report.off removes a given event handler if it exists.
	report.off("loaded");

	// Report.on will add an event handler which prints to Log window.
	report.on("loaded", function () {
	    Log.logText("Loaded");
	});

	// Report.off removes a given event handler if it exists.
	report.off("rendered");

	// Report.on will add an event handler which prints to Log window.
	report.on("rendered", function () {
	    Log.logText("Rendered");
	});

	report.on("error", function (event) {
	    Log.log(event.detail);

	    report.off("error");
	});

	report.off("saved");
	report.on("saved", function (event) {
	    Log.log(event.detail);
	    if (event.detail.saveAs) {
	        Log.logText('In order to interact with the new report, create a new token and load the new report');
	    }
	});       
              
              

The large number of companies who all are working on the analytics side are using Power BI. Being in the era where the data is the most important asset, the need of visualising and understanding the data is more and more in focus. Moving forward with a BI tool is a wise decision if your mainly business focus is data.

If you find it difficult to move your data and start using Microsoft Power BI in your organization or product, we are here to help you. Contact us and the PoC is for free.