From time to time I got asked how customers can export Paginated (or Power BI) Reports automatically to store them e.g. in OneDrive or any other location. One way is obviously to do it manually, but we’re looking for an automatic way. So why not use the out-of-the-box Subscribe button within Power BI Service? Because it will send you an email and you can’t decide to store it somewhere else. Luckily, Power BI offers an API to achieve what we’re looking for. But what if I’m not a developer and don’t know how to write code e.g. in PowerShell or Python? No worries, Microsoft got you covered with Power Automate!

Prerequisites

There are a few things which are needed to be able to follow this approach. First of all, Paginated Reports are part of a Power BI Pro license BUT if you wish to export a Paginated Report automatically, you still need a capacity (Premium or Embedded) to be able to do so. Reason is to make sure the end user is licensed in a proper way because through Premium the end user requires only a Free license. If you try to export a Paginated Report through the API backed up with a Pro license, you’ll get an error as you can’t make sure the end user also have a Pro license. That’s the reason why a capacity is needed. But buying Power BI Premium just to be able to export PDFs automatically is probably an overhead. Therefore we’re looking for a more cost-effective way which can be achieved with Power BI Embedded. Why? Because Power BI Embedded can be paused and it will not generate any cost at all! So we can turn it on just when needed, export our PDFs, and shut it down afterwards! Keep in mind while Embedded is paused the Reports in the associated workspaces will not be accessible.

So here’s a list of what we need:

• Power BI Pro license
• Power BI Embedded
• Power Automate license
• Service Principal with sufficient permission
• Basic understanding of REST API
• Basic know-how of DAX

Because we’re going to call the REST API to start and pause our Power BI Embedded capacity with Power Automate, the HTTP connector is needed which is Premium (as of February 2023). Therefore the O365 included licenses is not enough as “only” Standard Connectors are included.

If you’re interested in Power Automate Licensing please check the actual guide. Prices can be found here: https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

Setting the scene

For my example I’m going to reuse the Sales Analysis Paginated Report from the Paginated Report in a Day course. I want to create one PDF for each Fiscal Year automatically and save each PDF into OneDrive.

I published the Report to my “Demo” workspace which is backed up by an Embedded Capacity. Creating an Embedded Capacity is straight forward through the Azure Portal. A how-to guide can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded/azure-pbie-create-capacity, For our example the smallest (A1) SKU is enough.

Further, I prepared a folder in OneDrive called “Demo” where I wish to save my PDFs.

Let’s get started with Power Automate

Once I logged in into Power Automate via https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us I select “+ Create” on the left hand side and select “Instant cloud flow”. This means I can trigger my flow manually which is handy during development. Once done, I can change the trigger to e.g. a schedule like every Monday morning at 7am. After the new window pop up, I name my Flow as wished (PBI Guy – Save PDF from Paginated Reports), select “Manually trigger a flow”, and hit the Create button.

Let’s first test if I can save a PDF export into OneDrive and focus on starting & pausing the Capacity in a next step. So our first step is to get the PDF and then save it into OneDrive. To create a new action, just select the + New Step. Now, search for Power BI and select the build-in Power BI Connector. Once selected, scroll and search for “Export To File for Paginated Reports”.

Afterwards, we have to configure our action by selecting our Workspace, Report, wished Export Format, and specify our Parameter which is Fiscal Year in this case. Be cautious by naming the Parameter as you need the internal name, not the label of the Parameter. Therefore you have to open the Paginated Report with Report Builder and check the internal Parameter name.

In my case it’s called “DateFiscalYear”.

Now that I have all needed details I switch back to my Flow and configure the action by selecting the Workspace (Demo), afterwards a list of my Paginated Reports will appear where I select the Sales Analysis, and choose my wished Export Format. Per default it’s PDF but you can also choose another option if you wish. Next, I provide the Parameter name and add a Value (FY2019) for testing purpose.

Next, I add a New Step by hitting the button, search for OneDrive, select OneDrive for Business, and select “Create File” as new action.

Afterwards, I just configure the Path by selecting the small folder icon and browse to my wished destination. I add FY2019.pdf as file name and choose the File Content from the dynamic content pane as File Content for my action. If you somehow don’t see the dynamic content, just hit the button at the bottom right to expand it.

Let’s test the flow and see if a PDF will be saved into OneDrive. To do so just click at the top right on the Test button. A new pane will appear, just select Manually and hit Save & Test.

Running it the first time I need to sign in to the different connectors I’m using (Power BI and OneDrive). Just Continue to do so and hit as last step Run Flow. Keep in mind that the Power BI Embedded capacity has to run otherwise you’ll get an error as the Report is not available.

After approx. 1 Minute our Flow will finish and checking OneDrive I can see a new PDF has been created. Great! Opening it shows me that even the Parameter FY2019 has been passed and I see only FY2019 data – awesome! But now let’s parametrize it a little so my Flow will create a PDF for each FY available and not only FY2019. To do so I switch to Edit mode by selecting the appropriate button at the top right and add a new step right after our manual trigger by clicking on the + sign. I again search for Power BI and choose “Run a query against a dataset” as action. In here I select again my Demo workspace and Sales Analysis Dataset. The idea is now to run a DAX statement against the Sales Analysis Dataset to get all FY values which we will reuse to generate our PDF and save it. I quickly open DAX Studio, connect to my Dataset, and generate an EVALUATE DAX statement to get all FY values of my date table.

EVALUATE DISTINCT('Date'[Fiscal Year])

ORDER BY 'Date'[Fiscal Year]

I copy and paste the whole DAX statement into the query text of the action in my flow.

Again, to test if it works, I rerun the Flow and check the Output of my new action. As I can see there are different FY values as expected – perfect! I copy the whole output as we will need it for our next step.

I switch back to Edit mode and add a new step between the two Power BI actions. I search for JSON and select the Parse JSON action. Next, I add into the Content field the “First table rows” dynamic content from my previous step. Lastly, I hit the Generate from sample button and paste the result I copied a few seconds ago. This will automatically create a schema.

This step is needed to be able to get each value and reuse it afterwards to create for each FY a PDF. Before I move to my next step, I want to rename my Actions making sure by just reading them each user can understand what is happening. To do so, just select the three dots for each step and rename it accordingly. In my case I renamed the steps as following.

Now, let’s parametrize our Export to reuse the FY values dynamically. To do so, I select the Export action, scroll down to ParameterValues value section, delete my hard coded FY2019 and add Date[Fiscal Year] as dynamic content from my previous step. This will automatically create a “Apply to each” around my step.

Next, I drag and drop the “Save PDF into OneDrive” action into the Apply to each container and position it below the Export action. Lastly, I delete the hardcoded file name and again add the Date[Fiscal Year] dynamic content and add .pdf at the end. Otherwise it will not be saved as such.

Again, let’s test our flow and check the result. After roughly 4 minutes our flow has finished and I see 6 different PDFs in my OneDrive, one for each FY – awesome!

Now we have to make sure to pause the Power BI Embedded Capacity once the job is done. Also, we want to make sure it starts once the flow has started otherwise the PDFs can’t be generated. Let’s first focus on starting the capacity.

The official Microsoft Documentation shows the necessary REST API call to start resp. resume the capacity. There are different parameters which are needed:

• subscriptionId
• resourceGroupName
• dedicatedCapacityName

The full POST request looks as following:

https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/resourceGroups/{resourceGroupName}/providers/Microsoft.PowerBIDedicated/capacities/{dedicatedCapacityName}/resume?api-version=2021-01-01

So let’s create these three parameters in our Flow to make it easier to use and reuse them. After switching back to my Flow I add a new action right after the trigger to create the parameters as a first step. I search for Variable and select “Initialize Variable”. I name the first variable “Subscription ID”, make it a String type and enter my Subscription ID as Value. If you don’t know the Subscription ID, just check it in your Azure Portal by selecting the Embedded Capacity.

I rename my action from Initialize variable to Define Subscription ID Variable and redo the steps for Resource Group Name and Dedicated Capacity Name Variables.

Now, let’s try to call the REST API with the HTTP action. Again, just hitting the + Button after my variables and search for HTTP. Once selected, I can configure it. The Method we have to use is POST based on the documentation. In the URI field I copy and paste the whole REST API call. Once copied, I delete the general parameter from the URL (everything between and including the {}) and replace it with the previously created variables from the dynamic content pane. In the Headers section, I add Content-Type as key and application/json as value. Because the REST API is not publicly available we have to log in somehow to be able to call it. Therefore, we can expand the advanced options and choose our authentication method. As I work mostly with Service Principals, I select Active Directory OAuth. Once selected, there are a few more things to fill out.

In one of my previous blog posts I showed how to create a Service Principal (https://pbi-guy.com/2022/03/10/power-bi-and-activity-logs-with-python/) and also did a walk-through how to give the sufficient permission to the SP to start and pause the Embedded Capacity (https://pbi-guy.com/2022/09/22/assign-power-bi-workspaces-to-a-capacity-automatically/).

Let’s see how we can get the needed details. The Client ID as well as the Tenant ID can be found in the overview of the Service Principal.

The Secret can be generated from the Service Principal or, like in my case, I have it stored in Azure Key Vault so I add a new step before the HTTP Call to get the secret out of it. To do so, again, I hit the + button, search for Azure Key Vault, and select Get Secret. In there, I can select the different Service Principals I have access to but because I have to provide the Client ID in the HTTP request as well, let’s parametrize it and create a variable one step before called Client ID. Further, let’s add a variable for the Tenant ID as well. Once done, I can now use the variable within my Get Secret action by selecting Enter custom value and select the Client ID variable.

Further, I can now add the variables to the associated places in my HTTP action and use the value of my Secret action. Lastly, Audience have to be added which is in this case https://management.core.windows.net.

Let’s try and run our Flow to test it. If everything is set up correctly, you’ll get an error because the Power BI Embedded capacity is already running and you can’t start it again. Therefore following error will appear:

This means we need to check the status and, if it is paused, call the API, otherwise skip this part. And how can we check the status? Through REST API! Power BI offers an admin call to get all capacities (see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/admin/get-capacities-as-admin) We’re going to call it and check the status. So let’s create another HTTP request above the current one. This time, according to the documentation, we use a GET method and paste https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/admin/capacities into the URI field. As headers we use again Content-Type as key and application/json as value. To be able to authenticate I’m going to use again my Service Principal and luckily, I have everything stored in variables so I can just put them into the right place. Only the audience will change this time as we’re connecting to Power BI now, not to Azure, therefore I have to use https://analysis.windows.net/powerbi/api for it.

If I run the Flow now, it will still fail at the second HTTP action, but I get the result of the Power BI REST API and can check what the status is of my Embedded Capacity.

As a next step, I want to filter the result to only my capacity and extract the status. To be able to do so, I have to parse the body again to JSON and filter it afterwards. So, I copy again the whole body from the HTTP request and switch back to Edit mode. Once there, I add a new step after the Power BI REST API call and search for JSON and select Parse JSON. As content, I add the Body and generate the schema from a sample again by pasting it into the window after I hit the Generate from sample button. Now we have generated an Array which can be filtered. Therefore as next step I search again for Filter Array and select it. I put value from my previous step into From, select displayName as value on which I wish to filter and say it should be equal to my variable Capacity Name.

Now, that we filtered our result down to our desired capacity, we can do a check on the status. Let’s add a new step and search for Condition. In there, I add state from my previous step and configure is equal to “Active”. Once state is added as dynamic content, an Apply to each container will be automatically created. Just leave it as it is.

As next step, I drag and drop the HTTP request to start my capacity into the “If no” stream. This means, if the status is active, I don’t have to call the API to start it but if it’s not active, I would like to start it via REST API. As Power Automate will not wait until the Capacity is running and just continue to the next step, I want to make sure the capacity is in the desired state by adding a delay action of 30 seconds. Obviously, I could create a loop calling the Power BI REST API checking the status and, once changed to active, to proceed, but I’m not interested in the most performant way to execute this Flow but rather in an efficient, low-code way. Therefore the easiest method is to just add a delay.

Let’s one more time test our Flow making sure it’s working as expected. You’ll see, because the capacity is still running, it will go the “If yes” path and not call the REST API this time to start it. Therefore no error occurred and the PDFs have been generated again – great! And as you see the PDFs have been overwritten as we’re using the same name. This is expected behavior.

As a last thing we have to make sure now that our capacity will pause once the Flow is done. Again, checking the documentation there is almost the identical REST API call to pause resp. suspend the capacity. All we need to do is change “Resume” to “Suspend”. To be as sufficient as possible, let’s go to our Start Power BI Embedded action, hit the three dots, and choose Copy to my clipboard.

Now, I hit the + New step at the bottom of my flow, switch to My clipboard and select the copied action.

All I have to do now is to rename it and adjust the URI. What a time saver!

That’s it! Let’s test our final Flow by running it again. After roughly 4-5 minutes the Flow is done and I see on one hand that new PDFs have been created in my OneDrive and on the other hand my Power BI Embedded Capacity is now paused.

Let’s run it again making sure if the capacity is paused that the Flow will start it, still create the PDFs, and then shut it down. And again, after like 5 minutes it was successful. Checking the condition action in the Flow, we see the expression was false (capacity status is not active) and it went the right path to start it – perfect! During the run you could also refresh the page in Azure Portal to check the status of your capacity and you’ll see how it changed from Paused to Active and back to Paused.

The really last thing now is to delete the manual trigger at the top and replace it with what’s needed. E.g. a Schedule to run it every Monday 7:00am like in this example. Obviously, you can also choose other triggers depending on your needs. Keep in mind that Power BI offers a Power Automate visual out-of-the-box which can be used to trigger our Flow as well – from insights to action!

Please let me know if this post was helpful and give me some feedback. Also feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

If you’re interested in the files used in this blog check out my GitHub repo https://github.com/PBI-Guy/blog