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powerbipowerbi-embeddedpowerbi-desktoppower-bi-report-server

How to apply filter in PowerBI WebApp

I have created one WebApp which is hosted on Azure IIS. I am calling PowerBI reports & Dashboards and rending them into my WebApp.

I need to apply following functionality and I am unable to find solution online.

  1. Users can filter the data from filters available in PowerBI from Web Application.
  2. Row Level Security can be applied when we call PowerBI reports and render into web page.
Solution

  • It is not clear what kind of URL you are using to embed the reports. Essentially, there are 3 URLs that you can use to display a report in your web app:

    1. The URL taken from your browser's address bar. In this case the use of you web app needs to be logged in Power BI service and to be granted with rights to see this report. One of the disadvantages are that in your web app you will not see the report only, but the whole Power BI page (including the navigation menu at the left).
    2. The URL taken when you share this report publicly using Publish to web. In this case only the report will be embedded in your web app (menus will not be visible), but you can't do that for reports over RLS enabled datasets (because RLS requires user's identity, while in this case the access is anonymous).
    3. The embedUrl of the report (or tile, or dashboard) that you can obtain using the Power BI REST API. It is usually used when you have a dedicated capacity assigned to this workspace (Power BI Embedded). In this case there are two scenarios - "User own data" and "App own data". In the first one each of your users must have their own account and rights to see the report (as in #1). In the later scenario, you use one shared "master account" in your web app to get access to the report and there is no need for your users to authenticate themselves. You can take a looks at the samples to see how it works. Essentially, you need the JavaScript Power BI client, one HTML page with a and some JavaScript code to load the report in the (check powerbi.js, ReportLoader.html and ReportLoader.js files from the samples. A good place to start is this article - Tutorial: Embed a Power BI report, dashboard, or tile into an application for your customers.

    To apply filters to the embedded report, you can use one of the recently new features (if I'm correct, it is available since August 2018) and add the filters in the URL. I'm not sure will this work in case #2, but I will not recommend using it anyway.

    RLS is not possible with case #2. In cases #1 and #3 RLS will simply work. With #3 if you use "app own data" scenario, for the RLS to work you need to pass user's name and role when you generate the token to access the report (because otherwise for all user's requests Power BI will always see the identity of your "master account" and RLS will not make any sense). This is specified with EffectiveIdentity parameter.

    You also attached "power-bi-report-server" to your question, but at the same time you are saying that your web app is running in Azure. If after all your reports are on Power BI Report Server on premise, then you can embed reports by passing rs_embed=true parameter at report's URL too. In this case to make RLS work you just need to make sure that your users are authenticated with their own accounts. Passing filters in the URL works with the recent versions too (it was broken in March 2018, but fixed in 15.0.2.389).