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Building on the existing report cloning capability in Power BI Embedded, Microsoft has added support for cloned dashboards and dashboard tiles as part of the Power BI developer updates for September.
Power BI Embedded allows developers to incorporate the cloud-based data analytics and business intelligence software’s visualizations and reporting capabilities into third-party SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications. Report cloning allows independent software vendors (ISV) to quickly create a workspace template of sorts that can be reused to create a new work space for each new customer that comes on board.
Now, ISVs that use Power BI Embedded in their apps can fine tune the experience and still maintain the ability to quickly roll out additional work spaces by selectively cloning dashboards and the tiles that contain figures, charts and other data visualizations.
Before developers start cranking out clones, Microsoft program manager Nimrod Shalit suggested that they take some precautions.
“It’s important to note that when cloning a dashboard tile between dashboards in the same work space, the tile will be [bound] by default to its source report or data set unless a new target source is defined,” he wrote in a Sept. 18 blog post. “However, when cloning dashboard tiles between work spaces, you must first make sure the target work space already contains the target objects to bind to (report or data set).”
More information on the APIs involved in dashboard tile cloning are available in this online support document.
Developers are also getting some help in terms of localization. They can now set the language and text formatting of embedded content, added Shalit. The full list of new features is available in this blog post.
In a move that can help keep sensitive data under wraps, Microsoft has enabled row-level security for on-premises Analysis Services data sources. Borrowed from the company’s SQL database software platform, Analysis Services allows Power BI users to create interactive reports using data from a variety of big data repositories, cloud services and SaaS applications.
The new row-level security option is similar to the cloud-based implementation, except for one major difference, said Shalit. The so called “master user” identity used to call the APIs and authenticate the application must also be a On-Premises Data Gateway administrator. As its name suggests, On-Premises Data Gateway allows organizations to securely connect local data sources to the cloud-based Power BI service.
Meanwhile, On-Premises Data Gateway now supports Power BI Personal Mode on Microsoft’s National Clouds, courtesy of an update released on Sept. 15.
Personal Mode is an installation option that allows users to install the gateway software on their own computers, enabling access to on-premises data. Microsoft operates three national clouds, U.S. Government, Germany and China. In the case of Germany and China, Microsoft has partnered with local companies to deliver Azure services to those regions.
Users will also notice a new gateway configuration experience that mimics the interface used in Enterprise Mode. Lastly, an updated version of the software’s Mashup Engine, a software component that helps govern data connectivity, uses the same query execution logic as the latest version of the Power BI Desktop for added consistency when publishing reports to the Power BI service.