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Effective Identities And Power BI Embedded

Angela Henry shows how you can use Power BI Embedded for row-level security even when the accessing users don’t have Power BI accounts:

Now that you familiar with Row Level Security in Power BI, how do you make it work when you want to pass in your customer’s identifier because your customers don’t have Power BI accounts?  It seems like the only way to make dynamic row level security is to use the Username() DAX function?  But wait, doesn’t that require the user to have a Power BI account?  Sigh, it seems we are going in circles.

The one thing these articles don’t talk about is that when you are using Power BI Embedded, you can pass in whatever you like for the EffectiveIdentity via the Power BI API and it will “overwrite” the Username() function.  What?!  That’s right, it will completely ignore the Username() function and use whatever you give it.  WooHoo!

Read on for the details.