Power BI Developer Update — November 2019 — What is new in Power Bi?

At the beginning of November 2019, Microsoft introduced the capability to embed Power BI paginated reports in other applications. Microsoft’s September update for the Power BI Developer community brought a couple of new embed capabilities, automation & life-cycle management changes. However, the November update changelog is more extensive, with a total of 10 new and improved features being added to the service.

The following list covers all the changes that have been introduced as part of the latest update:

Embedded analytics updates Automation & Life-cycle Management

Embed Capabilities

• Embedded paginated reports
• Embedded AI — decomposition tree
• Automatic page refresh supported in Power BI embedded
• Personalize your table and matrix hyperlinks behavior
• Interact with your embedded mobile report with a single tap

Power BI Visuals Platform Updates Embedded Analytics

Connecting a Report to Datasets Using Dynamic Binding

While connecting a report to a dataset, you can use dynamic binding. The connection between the report and the dataset is known as binding. When embedding a Power BI report using dynamic binding, you can connect the same report to different datasets depending on the user’s credentials.

It is aimed at software vendors and developers that have multiple customers and users, each having their own unique workspace including a dataset connected to a Power BI report. This speeds up the process of maintaining hundreds of reports, Instead of copying and maintaining hundreds of report duplicates. The latest now lets developers maintain a single template of a report that can be connected to multiple datasets across workspaces.

The same report displays different information, depending on the dataset it is connected to. For example, a report showing retail sales values can be connected to different retailer datasets, and produce different results, depending on the dataset of the retailer it is connected to. This is great as it removes the need for manual intervention before sending out a report.

Clone and Rebind APIs Support Shared Datasets API for Generating Embed Token for Multiple Items Embedded Paginated Reports

Embedding paginated reports into your apps and portals is now generally available.

Decomposition Tree Visual

A decomposition tree can use to perform root-cause analysis by viewing how individual categories in a group contribute to the whole. The visual lets you break down, a group to see its individual categories and how they can be ranked according to a selected measure.

Automatic Page Refresh Supported in Power BI Embedded

Enabling the feature and setting the minimum refresh interval is the same for Power BIPower BI is a cloud-based solution that makes use of the available data to perform business analysis and helps share the results among the organization easily to derive actionable items. Embedded AzureMicrosoft AzureWith a comprehensive suite of cloud products, Microsoft Azure, a platform as a service (PaaS), helps its users to create and host enterprise-class solutions by collaborating with Microsoft’s products. The best part of Microsoft Azure is that its users can build and host solutions with having to build their own infrastructure. capacities and Power BI Premium capacities.

How to Enable the Feature

First, you must enable the automatic page refresh feature in Power BI Desktop. Go to File > Options and settings then select Options, and select Preview features from the left pane. Enable the feature by selecting the checkbox beside the Automatic page refresh. An automatic page refresh is available only for DirectQuery data sources.

To use an automatic page refresh, select the report page for which you want to enable refresh. In the Visualizations pane, select the Formatting icon and find Page refresh near the bottom of the pane.

Personalize your Table and Matrix Hyperlinks Behavior

New user action event, ‘dataHyperlinkClicked’. Power BI supports hyperlink columns. When clicking on a hyperlink cell in a table or matrix native visuals, the URL will be loaded into a new browsing context. With ‘dataHyperlinkClicked’ event, application owners can control hyperlink cell click behavior, by setting report embed configurations to raise an event and provide their custom event handler. The event contains the selected URL, and the click source — report, page and visual.

Interact with your Embedded Mobile Report with Single Tap

Bootstrap your iframe to Improve Rendering Performance

The new powerbi.bootstrap(element,config) allows developers to start embedding before all required parameters are available. The API prepares and initializes the iframe. When using the , it is still required to call powerbi.bootstrap(element,config) on the same HTML element. One of the use cases for this feature for example, is to run the iframe and the back-end calls for embedding (for instance, generate embed token), in parallel. It is highly recommended to use the when it is possible to generate the iframe before it is visible to the end user.

Power BI Visuals Platform New Context Menu Support

In November’s update, Visual options menu and Context menu extensions were added for embedded scenarios. Power BI visuals have two menus: Context menu and the Options menu. The options menu is opened by clicking the ellipsis icon on the top corner of the visual. The context menu is opened by right click/hover on the data. Both menus can now be extended to add customized actions specific to your app and users.

How to add a Context Menu to a Power BI Visual

You can use selectionManager.showContextMenu() with parameters selectionId and a position (as an {x:, y:} object) to have Power BI display a context menu for your visual.

To add a simple right-click event (or long-press for touch devices) Context-Menu here is a sample BarChart for reference:

public update(options: VisualUpdateOptions) { //... //handle context menu this.svg.on('contextmenu', () => { const mouseEvent: MouseEvent = d3.event as MouseEvent; const eventTarget: EventTarget = mouseEvent.target; let dataPoint = d3.select(eventTarget).datum(); this.selectionManager.showContextMenu(dataPoint? dataPoint.selectionId : {}, { x: mouseEvent.clientX, y: mouseEvent.clientY }); mouseEvent.preventDefault(); });

Also Read: All that’s NEW — Microsoft 2019 Release Wave 2 for Power BI & More

With 10 new and improved features added to Power BI in the November update, you can do more with your data. Get actionable insights from Power BI with these new features and make more informed decisions to push your organization further in the right direction.

We, at TechAffinity, are continuously helping our clients to stay updated, and we can help you get updated as well! Line up your queries and send them to media@techaffinity.com or get in touch with us, and we will assign a project manager for your needs right away.

Originally published at https://techaffinity.com on December 19, 2019.