By using this website, you agree to our Terms of Use (click here)
Hi Tim and other ARC Members!
I had a question concerning displaying Power BI Reports in Acumatica, that I am hoping you can answer. When I build a really awesome report in Power BI, complete with slicers, timelines, and stylish formatting, I save the report, pin it to my live power BI dashboard, then head over to Acumatica's Dashboards to go ahead and get it posted. I do the Client Secret and PW, then I see the name of the report that I have been waiting to post in my drop down options, but my question is, why is it, that when I try to post my Power BI reports in Acumatica, I get the error message saying, "This visual type is not yet supported or cannot be displayed due to security reasons." At this point, I can only display Power BI graphs that I pin to the dashboard, and not the whole Report. I make my report one page, with one graph that changes automatically based on the slicers and time lines the user enters, and I would really like for our employees to be able to interact with the reports inside Acumatica's dashboard, without having to travel into Power BI's sight. Is this something that is being worked on? Or maybe Microsoft won't let us do that since we could just purchase one 10 dollar user fee per month, and just have everyone else interact with the reports in the Acumatica Dashboards maybe?
Hi Potato Ghost,
I think we have two questions here:
- Why are you getting the "This visual type is not yet supported or cannot be displayed due to security reasons" error?
- Can you embed Power BI Reports instead of just Power Dashboard Tiles into Acumatica
Regarding the first question, I'm assuming that you're using the method outlined in this blog post which allows you to embed a Power BI Dashboard Tile (what you refer to as a "graph") into an Acumatica Dashboard. For some reason, Power BI (not Acumatica) restricts some of the visuals that can be displayed using this method. I personally have experienced the Custom Visuals in Power BI throwing this error message, but I think that some of the regular Visuals in Power BI might also give this error message based on my vague recollection of an email message that someone sent me a while ago, but I can't find the email now. Here is a discussion talking about the lack of support for Custom Visuals (click here).
Regarding the second question, there are two ways to do this:
- Use the method that Blair outlines in this blog post. The main drawback is that you have to publish your Power BI report with a public link that doesn't require any authentication to access it.
- I believe that there is another way to do this and it's been on my list to try and blog about. Maybe you can try it and let us all know how it goes. Within Acumatica, go to HELP -> User Guide -> Customization -> Managing Integration with External Applications -> Integration with External Applications and read the steps to setting it up. This should allow you to embed the entire report. There are actually even two options here, but I prefer the Power BI Embedded option because it doesn't require all users to have a Power BI account. Just know that, with the Power BI Embedded option, there is a fee every time someone views the report (click here).
Hi Tim!
Thank you once again for the excellent feed back. I am thrilled to know this is possible, but the report I want to put in a Acumatica Dashboard is very sensitive. It is a report that contains all of our sales and discount information since the very first time we started using Acumatica as our ERP. This report has a timeline filter that captures data from any given length of time. It can be used to see what open invoices we have, which customers are buying what, the discounts that customer received, a given sales person's sales for any point in history, and all sorts of other useful stuff. If that report were to be made known to our customers, and they accessed it publicly, that could, and probably, most defiantly, would come back to haunt Potato_Ghost. So that would rule out the public link option number one, but I have decided to move forward with option number 2, with the 5 dollar fee per 100 views. I think we could afford it, and it may be cheaper than buying Power BI pro accounts for all of those who need to view these reports. I started on this method today and realized this is going to be a lot more extensive and time consuming to set up, but I am up for the challenge, and will document my progress best I can, and will be sure to keep you and the ARC posted once I have made some headway.
Thanks Again Tim,
-Potato_Ghost
I agree. Very likely that Power BI Embedded will prove to be cheaper than buying pro accounts for all the users.
Definitely looking forward to hearing about your experience in setting it up!
Feel free to come back here with questions. Maybe a second (or third, or fourth, etc.) pair of eyes can help you if you get stuck during the process.
I got it to work with the Power BI option. No need for Power BI Embedded.
Actually, it seems like the Power BI Embedded option IS NOT the way to go (sorry for steering you wrong) because they just changed it last month to require Power BI Premium according to these two minutes of video (click here). And Power BI Premium starts at $625 per month / $7,500 per year which is pretty expensive.
The Power BI option does run under a Power BI user, but it seems like any Acumatica user can access it without needing their own Power BI account.
This is HUGE!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is way better than Power BI Embedded because you don't have to pay per view. I totally steered you in the wrong direction on that one. Sorry about that.
I'm still not clear though if you need a Power BI Pro license or if you can use the free one. I'm currently on a trial of the Power BI Pro license so I can't tell.
But I was able to get it to work. Take a look.
I setup one Power BI user connection on the External Applications screen (you click the SIGN IN button and get back the AUTHENTICATION TOKEN section when it's done (not sure why the Client ID and Client Secret are even needed).
Then you use the Application Resources screen to map Power BI reports to the Acumatica menu and grant access to them with Acumatica security roles.
But the really surprising thing is that I can run the report as any user (as long as they have Acumatica security permissions of course).
I confirmed that I can not only view the report as admin, but also as another user!!
Hi Tim!
What a relief! This is exciting. If we can just pay 10 dollars a month for a pro account, and get all the Power BI reports we want into Acumatica to be Accessed by others in our organization, we are going to be some very happy customers. lol It would sure beat paying $700 dollars a month. I am curious though, have you logged out of office and tried to access the Power BI reports in Acumatica? Also, I keep getting this error when I try the Application Resources part. I put in my client ID and secret that I used to post the tiles, but it does not seem to work. Do I need a new Client ID & Secret for the report maybe? I am getting the 401 error unauthorized.
Good point. I didn't think of logging out of office. I just tested it though in an Incognito browser window (which is logged out of everything) and it still worked. Phew, that was a close one.
I forgot to mention that I was also getting that error message that you got:
The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.
I had to edit the permissions in Azure portal because the https://dev.powerbi.com/apps method didn't set enough permissions.
Actually, the Acumatica help article here mentions on the very bottom the permissions that are needed:
https://help.acumatica.com/?ScreenId=ShowWiki&pageid=0b174aab-ae96-4b7d-aa8d-df83bdb06292
They are:
- View users Groups
- View all Reports (preview)
- Read and Write all Datasets
- View all Dashboards (preview)
To set the permissions, go to https://portal.azure.com and choose Azure Active Directory -> App registrations:
Then select your app. You can tell which is the correct one because APPLICATION ID matches the Client ID that you registered with Acumatica. This is the entry that was created by https://dev.powerbi.com/apps . I'm not showing a screenshot because the keys are a little secret (even though I forgot the black out the key in my screenshot above in a previous post 🙂
Then choose All settings -> Required permissions -> Power BI Service and select the additional permissions that are needed:
Are you testing this with a Power BI Pro license or a free license?
Also, I would like to point out, that I to received an Authentication Token when I did enter my Client ID and Secret.
But for Some reason when I go to Application Resources, and try to select the External name, which I assume is the report name, I get the error 🙁
Pro Trial. Do you think that is why I am having troubles?
I'm using Pro trial too.
You added the additional permissions above and it still isn't working?
Oh, wait, I forgot to mention that I had to go back into the External Applications screen and click the SIGN IN button again after adding the permissions in Azure to get it to pick them up in Acumatica.
It Worked!!!! 😀 You are the man Tim! I hope you are teaching another class in Nashville this upcoming February, I will be buying all your drinks! haha. Thank you very much for all your help on this. This is a pretty big break through haha. Do you think Mocrosoft would be upset about us being able to do that?
Awesome. Glad to hear that you got it working.
I wish I could teach a class in Nashville, but I doubt that they'd let me since I don't work at Acumatica anymore.
I'm also a little nervous about Microsoft blocking this at some point since it's such a cool feature. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
I did not know you left Acumatica. I am surprised they even let you leave, you know their product better than most anybody. Regardless, I hope you get to make it to Nashville, I would love to see you again in person.
Hopefully Microsoft does not block this ability, I am just really surprised that the User Guides in Acumatica do not mention the method you demonstrated. Is it possible that they do not even know how to add Power BI reports to the site map like that? lol Hopefully this ability does not go anywhere, our company spends quite a bit with Microsoft each month, but $700 dollars a month is way too high for our company to use Power BI the way we need to.
Power BI made a big change last month which is typical because it's their annual summit. The Acumatica documentation probably just hasn't caught up yet.