Project Details

A centrally managed refreshing portal for PowerBI

Goal

Companies frequently struggle to centrally manage all of their data updates in PowerBI. The rest of the users are restricted from altering the schedule and maintaining the refreshes because these refreshes can only be managed by the owner. Finding a solution that ordinary business users could utilize without using the PowerBI interface was the biggest engineering hurdle I encountered. Ideally, a portal would contain the following features:

1. A simple method to display all the updates across many workspaces

2. Controlling when datasets or data flows are updated

3. Alerts when a refresh is unsuccessful

The Solution

Making a SharePoint list that contains all the datasets, dataflows, and associated workspaces is the simplest way to handle this. All of the refresh schedules will also be included in the list.

In essence:

• Power Automate custom connector, to perform an API call easier to the Power BI REST API.

• SQL database to store all the API requests

• SharePoint lists, to set and save our refresh schedules.

• Power BI REST API, to trigger the refresh for both dataflows and datasets.