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Embedded Power BI in Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations

October 2nd, 2020 Amogh Chitnis Business Intelligence, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power

Power BI provides a way to integrate or embed your reports or dashboards into your website or app. One such way is by using Power BI Embedded – a technique or feature to integrate your Power BI reports into any platform without the need to have a Power BI account to view the reports.
Power BI Embedded uses Azure Active Directory to generate an Access token. Once, you have an access token then you can easily integrate or embed the reports into Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations.

Prerequisites

1. Administrator rights on Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and Visual Studio
2. An account created in PowerBI.com
3. Power BI Desktop installed on your desktop
4. Use the same login that you use for PowerBI Service

Steps for integrating Power BI with Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations

•  Sign in to https://portal.azure.com/using an Azure tenant admin account.
• Go to Azure Active Directory > App Registration > New App Registration

• Enter the following values:
  • Name – Your app name.
  • Application type – Web app/API
  • Sign-on URL – The base URL of your client. For example, https://contosoax7.cloud.dynamics.com

Note:
Depending on your version, you may need to add /OAuth as a suffix to the URL or use HTTP instead of https as the protocol, such as https://contosoax7.cloud.dynamics.com/oauth or http://contosoax7.cloud.dynamics.com/oauth.

• Click Register
• Copy the Application ID. This will be used to connect to the PowerBI.com service
• Click API Permission > Add Permission > Select Power BI Service (Power BI)

• Select Power BI Service. Then Add Permission

Specify Power BI setting in Finance & Operation

• Go to System Administrator > set up > Power BI. Com Configuration

• Paste your application ID and application key that you received from the Azure app

Power BI Desktop is a tool needed to develop new Power BI reports. Here’s how you can connect the Power BI desktop with Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations database:

• Open Power BI desktop and login with your PowerBI login credentials
• Click on Get data and select the SQL Server

• Enter the SQL Server database details on the next screen. Select DirectQuery in Data Connectivity mode. This enables reports to be created over large volumes of data. Additionally, the reports created by using Direct Query technology will get stored in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and will not be cached in PowerBI Service

• Once connected to the Dynamics 365 database, all the Aggregate measures available in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations will be presented. You can select the required measures to design and develop the reports.

• Hence, you can then publish the report to a specific workspace created in PowerBI.com

• Once the report is published from Power BI desktop, as a result, it will be available on PowerBI.com. You can pin it there to make it available to choose in Dynamics 365 Power BI tiles.

Steps to get Power BI report in Dynamics 365 F&O

Once you create and publish a report in the Power BI Desktop app, you can access the same report in Dynamics 365 F&O.

• Go to System Administrator > setup > Deploy Power BI report files > click Deploy Power BI files

Create Workspace for open Power BI report in D365 F&O

To open the Power BI report and make changes in the report created in the Power BI desktop app, you have to create a form as a workspace and add your Power BI report in that form. To create a form as a workplace, follow the below steps:

Create Form

1. Set Pattern of form as Workspace Tabbed
2. Create tile
3. Add your menu item of form in the created tile
4. Create an extension of nav pan menu
5. Add submenu in that extension
6. Right-click on the submenu and add menu element tile

You will see the Power BI tab after you configure Power BI with Dynamics 365 F&O. Click on Edit analytics to edit the Power BI report in D365 F&O. In the next screen, you can create a new report and edit report in Dynamics 365 F&O.

Conclusion

Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and Power BI are a great combination for users and business analysts. One great benefit is that Power BI reports are easy to share. There are a few Power BI content/reports already available for use in LCS (Microsoft Lifecycle Services). To know more about the integration of Power BI and Dynamics 365, contact us at sales@intech-systems.com
References: Microsoft