PBI Embedded reporting in Fund / Appeal custom tiles - Beginner's question.

Rob Wild

HI folks,

With the development of the PBI / MS integrations, (and the depreciation of CR) I'm looking at creating some simple PBI reports that I can embed into Fund and Appeal records in NXT.

Currently, I'm at the point where I've created a sample simple PBI report showing funds received over time, however have what I think is a beginner's question -

How does the embedded PBI report ‘know' which Fund record to display the data for? Is the filtering to "Fund = X" done within PBI, or done elsewhere? If so, how?

Edit: I might be getting ahead of myself - I might even need instruction on how to go from a PBI report that I have on my local machine to get it to an add-in

Rob Wild

Update:

Ok, I've got the PBI report embedded as a custom tile in the Fund record, however am having trouble with parameterising the report.

What I'm needing to know is how the recordID in the URL is added as the PBI filter to only report on that specific fund.

Ben Lambert

Hi Rob,

Have you seen the documentation we have on implementing Power BI add-ins using the Power BI Host SPA? Here's a link to the subsection where we describe how the add-in's context values (i.e., the system record ID of the current fund being viewed) can be mapped to your PBI report:

Hope this helps - let us know if you still have questions!

Rob Wild

Hi Ben,

Yes, I've been following that, however I'm missing something as the report isn't behaving as context dependant.

The PBI report is pulling on the APIs for Fund & Gifts. There is a relationship there between fundId and gift_splits_fund_id in the data.

What I have in the apps string is:
<reportID>&title=Donations Timeline&navContentPaneEnabled=false&contextField=gift_splits_fund_id

Where the contextField should equal the gift_splits_fund_id.

In the report, the gift_splits_fund_id is set as a string, rather than numeric if that's an issue.

I've also tried with the options of
&contextField=recordID&datasetField=gift_splits_fund_id as well, without success.

Edit: For reference, the PBI report itself has the gift_splits_fund_id as an all pages filter.

It feels as though I'm almost there, but missing something basic.

Trevor Kelly

Hi Rob- I recently struggled with this as well, but eventually got it working. I think the important pieces that you're missing are the parameters for datasetName and datasetField. The contextField probably isn't necessary, as it just defaults to the recordId.

Trevor Kelly

Another thing to note - it looks like your datasetField is gift_splits_fund_id - this should be the System Record ID for the fund (found in the URL of the fund record in webview).

Rob Wild

Hi Trevor,

Many thanks for taking the time to have a look at this with me, it's sort of working now, although not in the way that I would have expected.

I first tried it with using the Gifts Table and the “gift_splits.fund_id”, which does have the same values as the URL for the ID of the Fund record, however that didn't resolve it. However, changing it to look at the Fund table, “fund_id” works.

Would the inclusion of the full stop in the fieldname potentially be causing this issue?

It's about the only thing that I can think of, as the fields & values are otherwise identical in type and content.