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Power BI Developer community May update

Headshot of article author Nimrod Shalit

This blog post covers the latest updates for Power BI Developers community. Don’t forget to check out the April blog post, if you haven’t done so already.

Power BI Embedded

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Here is the list of May updates for embedded analytics.

 

Set the background color of the iFrame

When the iFrame size that is allocated for the embedded object and the embedded object itself do not share the same aspect ratio, it results in grey margins on the sides (shown below: marked in red).

Grey Shoulders

While using the ‘Custom Layout’ API, which allows you to define how to fill the iFrame or set fixed size for the object at any time, might solve most of the grey margins appearance, there are still cases where it does not solve it entirely.

We now enable application developers to set the background color of the iFrame by making it transparent. By doing so, the iFrame will get the defined color of the DIV element containing the iFrame. It will give developers full control of what color/ background layout will be seen in the margins, making the embedded object wrapped entirely by the application design.

Note: by default the color will still be grey, so definition needs to be set in the JavaScript code to get the transparency of the iFrame. Here is how you can do it:

let embedConfig = {

...

settings: {

background: models.BackgroundType.Transparent

}

};

Apply Bookmark state on report load through Bookmarks API

In our March blog post, we introduced support for Bookmarks API. This allows the ability to create bookmarks dynamically, by any user for any purpose.

This month, we enable the application to apply those bookmarks upon loading the report. This feature opens your application to more capabilities that can be added for your end users. For example, when an end user captures a report state, the application can allow the user to set it as a ‘default state’ for that report. Each time the end user opens the report, the bookmark will be applied, and the user will immediately see the report in the desired state for data exploration, rather than doing all the filtering from scratch repeatedly.

Setup your embedding environment – new and faster method

Want to get your POC up and running fast? Can’t wait to start coding with our APIs? We have built a new setup page that will take you through all the configurations needed to get started with Power BI Embedded faster than before.

The new setup page has dedicated flows for the two embedding solutions Power BI offers:

  • Embedding for your customers– Help your customers access the data they need to make better decisions from within your application, without managing Power BI licenses to all your users.
  • Embedding for your organization– Give your employees a single view across their ecosystem, no matter where they access their data. Manage users and permissions using Power BI licenses.

Community Spotlight- New sample application

Ted Pattison, a Power BI MVP and instructor from Critical Path Training, has published a great sample application of Power BI Embedded in GitHub. This sample shows the basics you need to embed a report and demonstrates many of the new capabilities we offer through the JS API to enrich your user’s interactions with analytics. Among the capabilities are Visual embedding, Bookmarks, Phased loading and many more.

 

Come and meet us!

Microsoft Business Applications Summit– tons of content for Power BI and Power BI Embedded, and a great chance to interact with the Power BI Product team.

MBAS banner

 

If you are puzzled or run into few issues, be sure to check our resources that can help you get by:

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

 

Custom Visuals

Power BI Custom Visuals for Excel… Better together!

As part of Build this year, we announced that Power BI Custom Visuals will be rolling out in Preview to Office 365. Now your Custom Visual in the marketplace can be reached to millions of Excel users. Same code used on both Power BI and Excel!

Read more about the integration and the announcement.

Early bits are coming soon, stay tuned!

For news and updates sign up here.

Report tooltips

With the new report tooltips feature you can now customize tooltip for other visuals that support tooltips. The feature was release in the Desktop release in March release

In other words, this feature lets you design a report page to be used as a custom tooltip for other visuals in your report.

To support displaying report page tooltips in your Custom Visual, add "tooltips" definition to capabilities.json as follows:

"tooltips": {
      "supportedTypes": {
           "default": true,
           "canvas": true
      },
     "roles": [
           "tooltips"
     ]
}

For more details on what changes you need to do in order to enable your custom visual support this feature please visit our GitHub

The API supporting Report tooltips for Custom Visual is 1.12 – planned to be released by next month.

Load More Data

Load more data API overcome the hard limit of 30K data point. It brings data in chunks. The chunk size is configurable to improve performance according to use case.

Please see code snippet

To be added in capabilities.json

"dataViewMappings": [

        {

            "table": {

                "rows": {

                    "for": {

                        "in": "values"

                    },

                    "dataReductionAlgorithm": {

                        "window": {

                            "count": 5000

                        }

                    }

                }

            }

 

In update method:

// CV update implementation

public update(options: VisualUpdateOptions) {

// special handling of the 1st segment of new data.

if (options.operationKind == VisualDataChangeOperationKind.Create) {

}

// on 2nd and later segments:

if (options.operationKind == VisualDataChangeOperationKind.Append) {

}

// complete update implementation

// fetchMoreData request could also be invoked from UI event handler

// check if more data is expected for the current dataview

if (dataView.metadata.segment) {

//request for more data if available

let request_accepted: bool = this.host.fetchMoreData();

// handle rejection

if (!request_accepted) {

}

}

}

Consistent filter experience as with the core visual slicer

With the new API released 1.12, the slicers in custom visuals will have consistent filter experience as with the filter in core visual.

For instance pin to dashboard will not be allowed as with the core filter, same with visual interaction both kind of slicers will have similar experience now.

 

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

· Contact us for support- pbicvsupport@microsoft.com

 

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 and vote in our Power BI Embedded Ideas forum, or our Custom Visuals Ideas forum.