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 for this month:

Embedded analytics

AUTOMATION & LIFE-CYCLE MANAGEMENT

Track Power BI content consumption with audit logs

Query caching for embedded reports and dashboards

EMBED CAPABILITIES

Sort visuals using an API is now available

Filters APIs now supports Top N filter type

Power BI Visuals Platform

About feature

Come and meet us!

Power BI Embedded

AUTOMATION & LIFE-CYCLE MANAGEMENT

Track Power BI content consumption with audit logs

Knowing who takes what action on which item in your Power BI tenant can be critical to helping your organization meet compliance and governance standards. Use Power BI auditing to audit user actions, like “View Report” and “View Dashboard”.

A new field called “ConsumptionMethod” was added, to give the tenant admin information about the method in which Power BI reports, dashboards and tiles are consumed within his organization.

“ConsumptionMethod” field was added to the following audit activities:

• Viewed Power BI dashboard

• Viewed Power BI report
• Viewed Power BI tile

Possible values are:

• Embedding for your customers
• Embedding for your organization

• Power BI mobile
• Power BI web
• Simplified embedding

No additional action is required for the “ConsumptionMethod” to appear in the audit activities mentioned above.

Learn more about audit logs in Power BI

Query caching for embedded reports and dashboards

Query caching speeds up content rendering by caching previously used query results. Query caching is now available for embedded reports and embedded dashboards backed by Power BI Premium or Power BI Embedded and is an additional performance improvement option in addition to the improved render performance options previously published.

For reports, controlling query caching is done on the dataset settings page in the Power BI service.

Learn more about query caching in Power BI

EMBED CAPABILITIES 

Sort visuals using an API is now available

In Power BI you can sort a visual by different columns/measures. By changing how you sort a visual, you can highlight the information you want to convey.

‘Sort visual by’ API is now available, and can be used to sort a single visual by one of its columns/measures and control the direction of the sort.

For example, after creating and personalize report visuals programmatically with Visual Authoring API, you can choose how the visual will be sorted and displayed to the users.

Below is a code snippet, to sort a visual by “Total Category Volume” measure, descending:

const request = {
    orderBy: {
        table: "SalesFact",
        measure: "Total Category Volume"
    },
    direction: 2 // models.SortDirection.Descending
};
visual.sortBy(request);

Learn more about sort visual by API

Filters APIs now supports Top N filter type

When analysing a dataset, you often want to look at categorical data and understand which are your best categories, and which are your worst.

Filtering by the Top or Bottom number of categories, sorted by a specific measure is now available by using the filters APIs with Top N filter type.

For example, to show the top 5 companies by total units:

const topNFilter = {
    $schema: "https://powerbi.com/product/schema#topN",
    table: "Manufacturer",
    column: "Manufacturer",
    $schema: "https://powerbi.com/product/schema#column"},
    orderBy: {
        table: "SalesFact",
        measure: "Total Units",
        $schema: "https://powerbi.com/product/schema#measure"
    },
    operator: "Top",
    itemCount: 5,
    filterType: 5 // pbi.models.FilterType.TopN
};
report.setFilters([topNFilter]);

Learn more about filters with JavaScript SDK

If you’re puzzled or run into any issues, be sure to check our resources that can help you:

• ‘Troubleshooting’ doc to help you bypass all the obstacles on your way to building a great app.
• FAQ doc to answer all your questions regarding the product, licensing, and Azure capacities.
• Community forum for developers, to seek answers or ask any other questions you have.

Power BI Visuals Platform

About feature

As of September Power BI Desktop release, report authors may click on any visual in the visualization pane to see an About dialog with more information on the visual.

Users will be able to see things such as the visual’s id, version number, and Source (e.g. AppSource, Organizational store).

If you create private visuals for your customers, make sure to fill properly the appropriate fields in pbiviz.json file so the About dialog of those private visuals will display relevant data.

Find below the fields that are displayed in the About dialog:

"visual": {
    "name": "chicletSlicer",
    "displayName": "ChicletSlicer 1.6.1", Displayed as visual Name
    "guid": "ChicletSlicer1448559807354", Displayed as id
    "visualClassName": "ChicletSlicer",
    "version": "1.6.1.1", Displayed
    "description": "Use this slicer to display image and/or text buttons that act as an in-canvas filter. Define additional properties for the layout & selection to customize this slicer to meet your specific needs",
    "supportUrl": "https://community.powerbi.com", Displayed
    "gitHubUrl": "https://github.com/Microsoft/PowerBI-visuals-ChicletSlicer"
},
"apiVersion": "1.13.0",
"author": {
    "name": "Microsoft", Displayed as publisher
     "email": "pbicvsupport@microsoft.com"
},

As always, feel free to use all the communication channels at your disposal to connect with our team, share your thoughts and ask questions:

• Community
• GitHub
• Contact us for support- pbicvsupport@microsoft.com

Come and meet us!

Power BI Embedded at Microsoft Ignite on a 45 minutes breakout session:

“What’s new and what’s next in Power BI embedded analytics”

Learn about the latest innovations in Power BI embedded analytics as well as the upcoming roadmap. Highlights include updates to authentication, application lifecycle management, enterprise reporting support, embedded AI and more!

Be sure not to miss it!

That’s all for this post. We hope you found it useful. Please continue sending us your feedback – it’s very important for us! Have an amazing feature in mind? Please share it or vote in our Power BI Embedded Analytics Ideas forum, or our Custom Visuals Ideas forum.