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Power BI Developer community February 2021 update

Headshot of article author Amit Shuster

This blog post covers the latest updates for the Power BI Developer community. Don’t forget to check out our last developer blog post if you haven’t done so already.

Here is the list of updates:

Embedded analytics updates

Announcements

Power BI Embedded Generation 2 (preview)

Power BI embedded analytics new Contoso demo

New Client APIs documentation

Embed capabilities

Track your user clicks with visual clicked event

Group extension commands into submenus

Save reports to different workspaces

New and improved filter experience

Power BI APIs & life-cycle management

New capabilities available for the export to file API

 

Embedded analytics

Announcements

Power BI Embedded Generation 2 (preview)

We’re thrilled to announce that the 2nd generation of Power BI Embedded, referred to as Embedded Gen 2, is available for Azure subscribers to use during the preview period.
 
The Power BI Embedded Generation 2 gives you enhanced performance, greater scale, lower entry level for paginated report and AI workloads, instant and without downtime scale, and improved metrics. Read all about it in the Announcing Power BI Embedded Generation 2 (preview) blog post.
 

 

Power BI embedded analytics new Contoso demo

We’re excited to introduce the new Power BI embedded analytics Contoso sales demo for you to play with. The demo includes many of the advanced features of Power BI embedded analytics. It shows a web application for customer relationship management (CRM) that is based on an embedded Power BI report. Explore how you can take advantage of Power BI embedded analytics to achieve more with your data and go from insight to action in your web application. You can also find the source code of this application on GitHub.
 
The application uses Microsoft Dataverse with Row Level Security (RLS), which filters the data securely and ensures each salesperson sees only his own leads, opportunities, and accounts.
 
To get a firsthand experience of the demo:

  1. Open the Contoso Sales Demo application.
  2. Select Salesperson.
  3. Select Enter in demo mode.

 
Power BI embedded analytics Contoso demo - opportunities page
 

New Client APIs documentation

The new Client APIs documentation is now available. Check out all the new articles on how to use the embedded analytics client APIs, and how to get started with embedding Power BI artifacts.
 
You can also find there references for all our client libraries: powerbi-client, powerbi-models, and powerbi-report-authoring.
 
Client APIs documentation
 

Embed capabilities

Track your user clicks with visual clicked event

You can now track your users’ interaction with visuals in the report with the new visualClicked event.
 
The event will be raised every time a visual is clicked by a consumer of the report, providing you with information regarding the specific visual that was clicked.
 
Using this event, you can improve your understanding of your report consumers and how they interact with your report and data. You can use this event to run a custom code on your web application side.
 
See How to handle events for more information about this event and others.
 
Visual clicked event on Power BI playground
 

Group extension commands into submenus

Power BI embedded analytics allows you to extend the visual menus, by adding commands that enhance the app experience. You can add extension commands in both the Context menu and the Options menu.
 
You can now group together these command extensions into submenus to ensure they fit your specific needs. You can use this to categorize and group together extensions based on user type, action type, etc.
 
See Modify menu commands for a report visual to learn more about using command extensions.
 
Extension commands grouping on Power BI playground
 

Save reports to different workspaces

You can now save your reports directly to different workspaces by simply specifying the target workspace ID in the saveAs client API. Until now, when using the saveAs API, the report was saved to the location of its dataset.
 
By using this capability, you can now allow your users to save additional copies of the report to a dedicated workspace and not to the workspace you embed from.
 
It’s important to note that you will need to ensure the user has write permissions for the target workspace, depending on the solution you are using:

  • Embed for your organization – The user needs to have write permissions to the target workspace, for example, be a member of the target workspace.
  • Embed for your customers – The workspace needs to be included in the list of target workspaces the embed token allows saving to, see the Generate Token REST API.

For more information about saving your report, see Create, edit, and save an embedded report.

New and improved filter experience

You can now control how you update the filters in your reports. The new updateFilters client API allows you to choose not only which filters to set, but also how to set them in regard to the existing filters.
 
By specifying a filter operation alongside your desired filters, you can now:

  • Add new filters to the existing filters.
  • Replace all existing filters with a new set of filters.
  • Replace existing filters with new filters that target the same data field.
  • Remove all existing filters.

The updateFilters API is supported in all filter levels: report, page and visual.
 
See Control report filters to learn more.
 
Update filters API on Power BI playground
 

Power BI APIs & life-cycle management

New capabilities available for the export to file API

The two new features that many of you have been waiting for are finally here!
You can now export to file a Power BI report with filters applied to it by passing URL query string parameters as part of the export request. Read more in the Export report to file filters section.
 
In addition, you can now also export a single visual and not only an entire page, read more on how to export a single visual in the Exporting a page or a single visual section.
 
 
 
That’s all for this post. We hope you found it useful. Please continue sending us your feedback – it’s especially important for us! Have an amazing feature in mind? Please share it or vote in our Power BI Ideas.