PLK on 10 Dec 2018 22:03:44
We have a problem currently with the fact that .pbix files are very different from any other SSRS reporting artefact in terms of enterprise readiness for deployments. We have a full-featured deployment system that can deploy entire trees of reporting artefacts along with replacing datasource definitions at deploy time depending on the target environment (DEV/TRAIN/PROD) etc. This has been working nicely for years but now we are moving to PBIRS and away from SSRS native mode, users want to be able to deploy .pbix artefacts in the same way. This seems to be basically impossible because:
•The file format of .pbix is not editable programatically (unlike every SSRS artefact) and so data sources cannot be changed directly which means they have to be uploaded to PBIRS and then changed with the REST API .... but ...
•Datasources inside a .pbix file have no name and even the ids change every time the file is deployed to a PBIRS server. So, there is no way of matching datasources to the database of connections we use to determine datasources for a target environment during deployment.
These issues make .pbix files really poor in terms of enterprise deployments. If anyone knows any way around these issues, I would be interested ...
It really is a basic part of any enterprise grade managed reporting solution to be able to change reports (datasources, parameters, cacheing etc). during deployment depending on the target enviromnent.