sh-notion/notion_data_team_no_files/How to publish a Power BI report 32dfe47f1d894205a3b19d994045db7f.md

How to publish a Power BI report

Table of contents:

Publishing a report to be reviewed

You have created a Power BI report with amazing insights and you want to make it available to your teammates for them to review your incredible masterpiece. Here’s the steps that you need to follow:

• Save the current report that you’re working on in local. Ensure that the report format is .pbip, not .pbix
• Click on Publish:

• Publish it to the destination Staging:

• While the report is being published, you will see the following window:

• If the report already exists in the destination, click Replace:

• When it’s finished, you will get the following success message:

• Click on Open “name_of_your_report” in Power BI to access the Staging report and ensure that the report is correctly loading:

• If it’s not loading correctly it might be because the connection with DWH it’s not set up. You’d probably have seen a step like this:

• If it’s the case, click on Open dataset settings or locate your Power BI report within the Staging Workspace:

• Click the 3 dots … and Settings:

• Go to Semantic models → Gateway and cloud connections:

• Configure the gateway connection to data-gateway-prd. You just need to set the Maps to: to dwh-prd

• Click on Apply and that’s it! If encountering any issue, contact the Data Engineer of your choosing 😀
• Lastly, commit your changes in your local branch and push it to origin. Create a Pull Request (PR) for other team members to review. Do not forget to include the link to the staging dashboard and few explanations on the changes / new additions to ease the review process.

Small tip: you can also follow a similar procedure to publish it in your own personal workspace. It might be useful if you want to directly share it as a temporary measure to gather user feedback from someone outside of the Data Team. Keep in mind that this will not be the location of the report once it’s fully published, though!

Creating a new Power BI workspace

Cool, your teammates have reviewed and approved your amazingly cool report. You want to make it available for other users outside of the Data Team to share the impressive insights and visualisations you created. But, oh-no, there’s no Power BI Workspace for your new report… So let’s just create one:

• In the Power BI Home, click on Workspaces → + New workspace

• Fill in the information of Name, Description. Do not add any Domain. Add a very cool looking Workspace Image. No need to modify anything under the Advanced tab. Once settled, click on Apply:

• Check that the new workspace has been created correctly. It should appear empty the first time you create it:

• Give individual access to your Data Team colleagues as Admin in the newly created workspace. You can do so by clicking on Manage access → + Add people or groups

• Once all members have been selected with the correct role, click Add:

• That’s it! Well…
  • … but probably you’d like to add here your new report. You can reproduce the steps to publish listed before, just changing the destination from Staging to the new Workspace.
  • … and also you’d like to create a new Power BI App with your report, explained here
  • … and also definitely you’d like to grant access to users into your Power BI App, explained here

Creating or updating a Power BI App

Power BI Applications allow to gather different reports within the same workspace to be displayed as a standalone report for users. We also have the convention in the Data Team to grant user access to the Power BI Apps, instead of standalone reports or workspaces. Follow this steps to create or update an existing Power BI App:

• In the Power BI Home, locate and open the Workspace you want to create the application in. Once you’re in the Workspace view, click on Create app or Update app:

• Fill in or review the configuration within the Setup tab. If you’re creating a new application, don’t forget to add a very-cool-looking logo! Once finished, click on Next: Add content:

• If you’re updating an existing App, the already displayed reports will show up here. In this case, ensure that the new report you want to integrate within the app is properly configured. If you’re creating it for the first time, you will need to click on Add content:

• Select the reports that should appear in the app and click Add.

• Check that the content is now filled with your newly added report. You can click on the little drop up/down arrow to see the tabs of your report. Once it’s looking good, click on Next: Add audience:

• In the Audience tab, ensure that the little eye icon is set as visible for each report that should be available within an App. Here you can also add or edit the audience. By default the workspace users (i.e., the Data Team) will have access to it, but you also probably want to share it with some users outside the Data Team. In this case, you will need to create a new Power BI App group dedicated to your application - you can always do it later if you prefer. Once everything is ready, click on Publish app:

• … and Publish again…

• … and click on Go to app to check that the new Power BI App is working properly.

Small note: when updating an app, you will always have the choice to skip certain tabs on the Setup, Content and Audience, and clicking on the bottom right corner will always show Update app. In this case, do the relevant changes and when satisfied, update the application.

Granting access to users in a Power BI App

To ensure that your marvellous reporting is being used across the company, first users will need to have access to it. Crazy, right?

At this stage, the user access is granted at Power BI App level - this is, not at Report nor Workspace level.

In order to do so, we need to have a dedicated Azure group for users that should access our app. Mainly you just need to contact Ben Robinson and ask him to create a new group for your new application, or provide him with the name of the existing group. Please, follow the convention PowerbiNameOfYourApp.

You will also need to provide him with the users that should be added - or deleted - within this group. Don’t forget to ensure that the Data Team users are included in the group as well!

Little tip: we strongly advice to add the Data Team as users of the Power BI group, even though it’s technically not necessary because Data Team has access to the different workspaces. Why? Because this way we can know which users have access to each Group. It can be accessed in your Microsoft Account settings under My Groups, Groups I am in and filtering by PowerBI:

Select your desired group and click and navigate to Members to see who has access to the Power BI App. For example, for PowerbiCheckInHero (Check In Hero Power BI App):

Add the report details to exposure.yaml in dbt project

The exposures.yaml file is used to define exposures within your the dbt project. Exposures are a way to document and describe how certain dbt models, metrics, or analyses are used in external systems or by specific users.

Here you can include some small details and description of the report but most importantly the models which it depends on and the owner.

Add the report to our Data Products inside Data Catalogue

Here we have a catalogue of all our current (when updated) reports

Here anyone interested can have access to some more detailed information about the report both general and technical details.

This is a very good place to explain anything that might not be 100% clear inside the report and we don’t add because of space or aesthetics concerns