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Enable Publishing Power BI Reports using XMLA to Service

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Ahmad Anuar's profile image

Ahmad Anuar on 03 May 2019 14:24:02

Reports that are using PBIP Server(XLMA) as Azure AS data source in Power BI Service is currently not supported. Enable this functionalities will let us to publish report to different App workspace which Power BI Datasets connector is not allowed to.

Comments (3)
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Duncan Mitchell on 15 Dec 2021 02:12:26

RE: Enable Publishing Power BI Reports using XMLA to Service

Just to answer my own query here, a workaround which I managed to figure out

Use a local tenant account to author a blank report using "Power BI Datasets", connect to the same service Dataset and save the .pbix
Rename the pbix to .zip, open and extract the "connections" file
Rename the guest-created report .pbix to .zip
(this file is using "Analysis Services" connection to XMLA) 
overwite the "connections" file in guest .zip in [3] with file extracted in [2]
Revert the guest-created report .zip to .pbix
Now when the guest uploads their .pbix file it will be using a "Power BI Datasets" datasource.

PS: this confirms that the limitation of a guest authoring reports against external tenant Power BI Service Datasets is simply a UI limitation of PBI Desktop; PBI Desktop should simply ask which tenant to connect to and generate the correct "connections" file

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Duncan Mitchell on 15 Dec 2021 02:12:10

RE: Enable Publishing Power BI Reports using XMLA to Service

Just to answer my own query here, a workaround which I managed to figure out

Use a local tenant account to author a blank report using "Power BI Datasets", connect to the same service Dataset and save the .pbix
Rename the pbix to .zip, open and extract the "connections" file
Rename the guest-created report .pbix to .zip
(this file is using "Analysis Services" connection to XMLA) 
overwite the "connections" file in guest .zip in [3] with file extracted in [2]
Revert the guest-created report .zip to .pbix
Now when the guest uploads their .pbix file it will be using a "Power BI Datasets" datasource.

PS: this confirms that the limitation of a guest authoring reports against external tenant Power BI Service Datasets is simply a UI limitation of PBI Desktop; PBI Desktop should simply ask which tenant to connect to and generate the correct "connections" file

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Duncan Mitchell on 14 Dec 2021 23:48:08

RE: Enable Publishing Power BI Reports using XMLA to Service

In the scenario, when a PBI Desktop Report is authored by a B2B Guest, they have to connect to the external tenant's PBI Service Datasets using XMLA over Analysis Services (because they can only see their home tenant PBI Datasets when trying to get data from PBI Datasets)

Is this still a limitation? Is there any alternative for B2B Guest Desktop authoring and publishing against existing PBI Datasets in another tenant?