This link may be behind a paywall at medium.com, depending on how many “members only” articles you’ve read there (medium is a hosted blogging platform which seems to be growing in popularity). I thought there might be some useful information for some readers.
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At the November 2021 Atlanta Microsoft BI User Group meeting (https://www.meetup.com/Atlanta-Microsoft-Business-Intelligence-Users) there was an update on the PowerBI Rest APIs. The scope of API support for PowerBI has grown exponentially, as illustrated by the documentation home page (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/). The documentation even includes support for interactive use of the APIs, avoiding the need to write code (PowerShell, .Net) or use a 3rd party app like Postman to test the API. In addition, the interactive application displays the url and http headers which are used to access the data, allowing them to be copied and pasted into PowerQuery to connect PowerBI to the Rest APIs to provide interactive, formatted views of the returned data.
The example used at the meeting was the Unused Artifacts API, which lists items in a selected Workspace by date of last use. The data returned by the interactive tool is JSON, as shown in the walkthrough below. By querying this same URL with PowerQuery, it’s possible to parse and format the JSON for ease of use.
To use the interactive feature, select the Admin group (where the Unused Artifact API lives), and scroll down to the API:
You can actually retrieve a list of Workspace IDs using the Admin – Groups GetGroupsAsAdmin Rest API, but it may be easier just to get it from the URL of the Workspace home page on PowerBI (it’s the GUID after the word “groups” in the URL (app.powerbi.com/groups/{WORKSPACE ID}/list, for example). Click the green Try it button to open the interactive application interface.
In PowerBI Desktop (or Excel PowerQuery), select Get Data->Web
Click OK on the From Web dialog. PowerBI will ask how you want to authenticate to the web – we’ve already included the Authorization header, so Anonymous access is fine. Click Connect.
This post is authored by Alan Yu, Program Manager, SQL Server and Karl Burtram, Senior Software Engineer, SQL Server. We are excited to announce the March release of SQL Operations Studio is now available. Download SQL Operations Studio and review the Release Notes to get started.