Are you familiar with the Power BI Embedded Playground? First, for those of you who don’t know, Power BI Embedded is a Microsoft Azure service that allows developers to embed visuals, reports, and dashboards into an application. The Embedded Playground is an interactive showcase created for developers to explore embedded features and capabilities for their applications.

Today, I’d like to demonstrate how to bring your own Power BI report into the Embedded Playground.

  • The Playground provides sample reports that you can try out.
  • When you click on a report the connection information is already populated and by clicking ‘run’, it will pull that report into this Embedded Playground space.
  • There are also pre-populated code snippets available to you. Let’s say I want to set the slicer state. I can’t edit or delete the code, but I can copy it and run it. In my example, that code will see that a new date range has been populated in the embedded post and the visuals will change accordingly.
  • This is a great option if you want to explore some functionality with an embedded solution, but you don’t want to spend time building out a coding solution.
  • What I really want to show you is how you can bring your own report into this Embedded Playground, so you can get a sense of how this is going to work or maybe you just want to test out the connection info.
  • To do this, we first need to change the token type from an embed token to an Azure Active Directory (AAD) token.
  • In the Power BI Service, I open one of my reports. An easy way to get the embed token from this in Chrome is to right click on the report page and then click view the page source.
  • On that page source you’ll see the embed token that you can copy and paste into the AAD embed token field back in the Playground page.
  • Next, I go back to my report in the service to get the embed URL. To do this, I go to the top bar and click the ellipsis and then embed website or portal. This will bring up a long URL that you can use.
  • BUT, we don’t need that entire URL in the case of the embedded playground. Check out my video included to see the snippet of the URL you’ll need to copy and paste back in the Playground.
  • The last piece we need is the report ID which is in the URL we just added so just copy and paste that ID into the field.
  • When we hit run, it will bring in my report from the Power BI Service. It’s a live report and I can interact with it as if it were in an embedded solution.
  • One thing to note, many of the interactions that are available for the sample reports are available for your specific report, but some of them may not work as this is hard coded.
  • But it is a great way to show some capabilities and see what some of the coding will look like.
  • To make this work in your custom solution, it just takes a bit of editing of the existing code and you can take that and work on it within your own report.

I’ve run into this hurdle of getting my own reports in the Embedded Playground, so I wanted to share this quick demo with you – I hope it is helpful.

Again, the Power BI Embedded Playground is a cool tool Microsoft provides for developers to check out embedded features and capabilities for their applications. So be sure try it out!

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