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Embed paginated reports in your own application for your customers (Preview)

Headshot of article author Alon Baram

Power BI paginated report embedded in an application for non-Power BI users

Paginated reports bring a new set of enterprise reporting capabilities to the Power BI service. They enable developers and BI professionals to create and distribute highly formatted, pixel-perfect reports. When leveraged using Power BI, paginated reports become the first cloud BI solution that combines the power of self-service BI, with the needs and capabilities of traditional Enterprise BI scenarios.

One of the most popular scenarios with SQL Server Reporting Services is embedding paginated reports into other applications. Today we are thrilled to announce the public preview of embedding paginated reports in your own application for your customers (also known as the ‘app owns data’ model).

Embedding paginated reports for customers, allows ISVs and developers additional flexibility when embedding intelligence into their applications, using Power BI APIs. ISVs and developers can take advantage of minimal development effort to achieve faster time to market. They can also differentiate themselves by infusing into their applications, Microsoft’s world-class analytics engine which already includes paginated reports on top of it. In addition, developers can spend time focusing on their solution to meet customer demands, instead of developing visual analytics features.

Tutorial: Embed Power BI paginated reports into an application for your customers demonstrates how to integrate a paginated report into an application using the Power BI .NET SDK with the Power BI JavaScript API.

The following set of capabilities supports the scenario of embedding paginated reports in your own application for your customers:

  • Row-level security in embedded paginated reports – When you embed a paginated report, you can control which data is displayed. This allows tailoring the displayed information per user and provides a secure way of displaying a subset of the data, in a way that does not compromise the rest of data. It resembles the Row-level security feature, which provides a secure way of displaying data in Power BI reports.

Learn more about row-level security in embedded paginated reports

  • URL parameters in embedded paginated reports – This capability, already supported in Power BI service, allows ISVs and developers to control their users experience by appending extra parameters to the generated Embed URL. You can try this by using the Power BI Embedded Playground sample tool, clicking ‘Try it’ on the Sample Paginated Report, manipulating the Embed URL, and clicking ‘Run’.Sample paginated report to try in Power BI Embedded Playground
    Here are a few examples to get you started:

    • To set a specific ‘Order’ parameter (for example, SO50689), append &rp:SalesOrderNumber=SO50689 to the end of the Embed URL
    • To set multiple parameters, append &rp:BusinessType=Warehouse&rp:ResellerKey=51&rp:SalesOrderNumber=SO53532
    • To export the paginated report to PDF, append &rdl:format=PDF

    Learn more about URL parameters in Power BI paginated reports

Please use the following resources to learn more about the product, get your questions answered, and give us feedback and suggestions:

What are paginated reports in Power BI

Power BI Paginated Report Builder

Embed paginated reports in your application for your customers

Implementing row-level security in embedded paginated reports

Power BI Embedded Playground

Power BI community for developers

Power BI ideas – API and embedding