Chris Webb has started a series on calling Power BI’s REST API from Microsoft Flow. In Part 1, he creates a custom connector:
Playing around with Microsoft Flow recently, I was reminded of the following blog post from a few months ago by Konstantinos Ioannou about using Flow to call the Power BI REST API to refresh a dataset:
https://medium.com/@Konstantinos_Ioannou/refresh-powerbi-dataset-with-microsoft-flow-73836c727c33
I was impressed by this post when I read it, but don’t think I understood quite how many exciting possibilities this technique opens up for Power BI users until I started to use it myself. The Power BI dev team are making a big investment in the API yet most Power BI users, myself included, are not developers and can’t easily write code (or PowerShell scripts) to call the API. With Flow, however, you can use the API without writing any code at all and solve a whole series of common problems easily. In this series of blog posts I’m going to show a few examples of this.
In Part 2, Chris shows us how to automate data refreshes when source data changes:
For a while now I’ve had an idea stuck in my head: wouldn’t it be cool to build a Power BI solution where a user could enter data into an Excel workbook and then, as soon as they had done so, they could see their new data in a Power BI report? It would be really useful for planning/budgeting applications and what-if analysis. I had hoped that a DirectQuery model using the CData Excel custom connector (mentioned here) might work but the performance wasn’t good enough; using Flow with the Power BI REST API (see Part 1 of this series for details on how to get this set up) gets me closer to my goal, even if there’s still one major problem with the approach. Here’s how…
Read on for the approach as well as the major problem.