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.
