Author: Daniel Mendez

Categories
Power Apps PowerBI

PowerApps integration in PowerBI

The use of PowerApps in a dashboard is a great advantage as it offers a greater user experience when interacting with our app, and is also a method of reading, writing, and editing information directly to the data sources of the report.

To integrate a PowerApps app on a report, firstly you need to make sure all the data sources required for the app are also in the report and then insert a PowerApps visual. It can be inserted either in the ‘Insert’ ribbon and the ‘Power Platform’ section or in the quick visual menu.

Now we have an empty PowerApps visual that needs to have data assigned. In order to do it, just select the columns your app needs to run while the visual is being selected and it will change, letting you either create or choose an already existing app from one of your environments.

 We recommend that you use the option ‘Create new’, as this option is the only one which provides the possibility of passing values between the power app and power bi. As soon as you select to create a new app, a message will appear to redirect you to the PowerApps application editor. This new app will have a component called ‘PowerBIIntegration’, that will contain all the data you imported from the tables in the PowerBI report.

This new component allows the creator to use the data from the columns included in the visual of the report. The best way to use this feature is with a gallery, a list, or any equivalent way to represent information like this, if any field is filtered in the report, the item or items that meets that filter will be displayed. As an example, an app with a gallery and once in the report without filtering and filtered will look like the following images.

This is the report before applying any filter.

And this is how it looks after the filters.

As you can see when the row ‘Product 2’ is selected from the table, the gallery that contains all of its elements is filtered to only show that element. This can be also used with PowerBI slicers like a list or a dropdown the same way as selecting a record of the table, which will change the gallery from the app. Now there will be three example images with slicer filtering.

Even though the ‘PowerBIIntegration’ component sounds amazing, actually it only allows to read the data imported from PowerBI so if you want to add, delete, or edit any data, you will have to import the complete table where it comes from to the PowerApps app.

To conclude, an important thing to consider is that once you have selected the columns to include and create the new app which has the PowerBIIntegration component, you will not be able to modify the data inside this component. So be sure to have selected all the columns you need or be prepared to start from the beginning again after selecting your data correctly.

Categories
Power Apps

PowerApps Licenses Application

PowerApps is a platform for app development that belongs to the Microsoft Power Platform, in addition to Power BI and Power Automate. It is a low-code based platform where anyone can build professional-grade apps while being capable of connecting to a large variety of data sources, in order to access all the information needed to complete the app. It also can be connected to Microsoft Dataverse, a smart data platform which allows fast and easy data management apart from being secure and scalable while requiring no coding.

To be able to visualize a PowerApps application once integrated in a PowerBI report, a license is needed. There are two main plans: Subscription plan and Pay-as-you-go plan. The first one is aimed to businesses who want a regular user-based license and is divided in two plans, ‘Per app plan’, which runs one app or portal per user; and ‘Per user’ plan, which runs unlimited apps and portals per user. The second and last plan is for businesses who want to pay only when a user runs an app.

If more information is needed about the plans you can check the following links, About Power Apps per app plans and Pay-as-you-go plan overview. Moreover, for more information about pricing, please follow this link: Pricing – Power Apps. Both plans in the ‘Subscription Plan’ can be purchased through the link previously mentioned by just clicking the ‘Buy now’ option below each one’s description.

If you only have one app which you are going to use, I recommend purchasing one ‘Per app plan’ from the ‘Subscription Plan’ as it would be more profitable due to you will be paying $5 instead of $20 for the same app per user. This can also apply in case of having two or three apps which will be being used periodically, as the amount to pay will raise to $10 or $15 per user for all the apps. From four active apps and ongoing, is better to study each case and choose the most profitable plan.

Furthermore, a Production type environment is needed in PowerApps to hold permanent work in the organization. The environment can be created with the license purchased as previously mentioned, but only two of this type of environment, along with two Trial type environments, can be created. To create a Production environment in PowerApps, first of all you need to access PowerApps Admin center and to the Capacity window in the Resources option of the menu. There you need to check the database capacity you already have, as for the creation of a Production environment, 1 GB of space is required. With the purchase of a license, your organization gets 5 GB of Database capacity, 2 GB of Log capacity and 20 GB of File capacity, and with every license you will get 50 MB of Database and 400 MB of File capacity. This means you can already create a Production environment as you have enough Database space and have far more than enough File capacity to hold your data in the Dataverse without any storage problem.

As you have enough database capacity for the Production environment, press on the ‘New’ button in the ‘Environments’ panel to create it.

After you click it, the following panel will appear, and the details of the new environment have to be filled. The two most important things to check are to set the Type to ‘Production’ and mark as ‘Yes’ the option of creating a database for the environment. Then click on ‘Next’ to continue.

The last step is completing the other panel. Some items worth mentioning are to correctly set the Currency and to select a Security group, which is a good practice to avoid any security break.

Now you can freely create and use tables from Microsoft Dataverse and PowerApps applications, but in case of needing more file space, which will not be the case with few apps and tables, you can buy additional capacity through Microsoft 365 Admin Center following this instructions, Add Microsoft Dataverse storage capacity – Power Platform.

Categories
PowerBI

Privacy Levels in Data Sources

Privacy levels of a data source are a good way to increment our reports’ security as they specify the isolation level that defines the degree that one data source will be isolated from other data sources, in other words, how the different sources restrict their information to certain users or does not restrict, apart from how the sources interact with each other by being folded following a hierarchy. Although a restrictive isolation level blocks information from being exchanged between data sources, it may reduce functionality and impact performance.

DIFFERENT PRIVACY LEVELS

The different options to set the privacy level of a data source in PowerBI are None, Public, Organizational and Private levels, each one of them with their own characteristics and contributions to security. From this point we will go through every level explaining the benefits and the case of use.

A None privacylevel data source does not have any privacy which is a bad practice and should be avoided, for cases where no privacy is required, a good practice is to set the level to Public instead of None.

A Public data source gives everyone visibility to the data contained in the data source. Only files, internet data sources, or workbook data can be marked Public, and its data may be freely folded to other any other source.

An Organizational data source limits the visibility of a data source to a trusted group of people. Data from an Organizational data source will not be folded to Public sources, but might be to other Organizational sources, as well as to Private sources.

A Private data source contains sensitive or confidential information, and the visibility of the source may be restricted to authorized only users. Moreover, data from a private data source will not be folded to other sources, not even to other private sources.

To sum up and give some good practices, it is highly recommended to avoid None level and set the privacy to Public instead, which gives data visibility to every user. It should be configured a Private level only to those sources with sensitive information to avoid leaks or any unwanted changes, but it is not recommended to set every data source that requires any level of visibility restriction to Private, it is better to configure it to Organizational and include the people in which you are interested in having data visibility to the group you trust.

CONFIGURING PRIVACY LEVELS

You can configure the privacy level of the data sources of the report from PowerBI Desktop or Power Query, not from PowerBI Service.  If you are in PowerBI Desktop, open the ‘File’ menu on the top left corner, go to ‘Options and settings’ and then select the ‘Data source settings’ option.

While in the case of Power Query editor, look for and click on the ‘Data source settings’ option on the Home ribbon.

Once you get to the Data source settings, a new panel will appear with a list of all the data sources that are being used in the current report.

To configure the Privacy level of the data source you are interested in, select it and click on ‘Edit Permissions’ and another panel will open up.

In this menu you only need to select the Privacy Level you want from the dropdown marked in red and click on the OK button. Then just close the Data source settings panel and you have changed the Privacy Level of a data source!