Power BI dashboards are optimized to monitor the status of your business at a glance. Business applications are optimized to manage your business. Wouldn’t it be great if you could monitor your business in the right context of a business application and, for example, see your customer profitability analysis from within your CRM application?
You can do that! We have recently enabled embedding Power BI dashboards into your business applications, allowing you to stay focused on your work while still monitoring familiar Power BI dashboards.
Reminder: why are dashboards so useful?
Many goodies make dashboards a great tool to monitor your business at a glance, for example:
- Showing only the important visuals from separate reports
- Real time tiles
- Reporting live tiles
- Complementary data with web widgets
- Awesome full-screen mode!
Let’s start embedding
Dashboards can be embedded into your applications by using the Power BI JavaScript SDK with the dashboard embedding API and this embedding sample application shows how to do this.
Additional documentation about embedding options are in the Power BI developer documentation page. In this example we show the how report embedding looks in the sample application.
Screenshot: An embedded report in the sample application code
To make this work in the sample application code, all you have to do is:
- Register your application
- Download or clone the entire sample from GitHub
- Open the GitHub project in Visual Studio:
- Fill in the Client ID and Client Secret in the web.Config file
- Build the project for the dashboard sample (integrate-dashboard-web-app)
- Run the project in a browser
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- Sign-in to the sample application with you Power BI account credentials
- Use one of existing dashboards embedding URL, and click embed
Screenshot: the dashboard sample application
A few more considerations to keep in mind
While embedding dashboards in applications, these points should be noted:
- The end users who access the embedded dashboards must have Power BI accounts, and the dashboards should be shared with them
- Currently QnA is not supported in embedded dashboards
- As a temporary limitation, when sharing a dashboard with security groups, user have to first access a dashboard in PowerBI.com before they can see it embedded
More resources and feedback
Here are some more resources about what developers can do with Power BI:
Your comments, questions and general feedback are super important for us to improve the product. Kindly send us feedback here: pbiefb@microsoft.com.