Calling The Power BI Export API From Power Automate, Part 1: Creating A Custom Connector

Recently, a new set of endpoints in the Power BI REST API for exporting Power BI reports and paginated reports to files went into public preview (see the main announcement here and the paginated reports announcement here). Since there are all kinds of cool things you can do with this I thought I would write a few posts on how to use these endpoints in Power Automate. In this post I’ll talk about setting up a custom connector in Power Automate; in the next post I’ll talk about how to use this custom connector in Power Automate; and after that I’ll show you some less obvious uses for all this.

Before we go any further, and before you get too excited, you should read the limitations of the public preview listed here, especially those around the number of report pages that can be exported per hour and the number of pages in a report that can be exported. Also, this functionality is only available with Power BI Premium or Power BI Embedded.

Creating a Power Automate custom connector for the Power BI REST API is something that several people have blogged about already in detail. Konstantinos Ioannou has a very detailed walkthrough here; Jese Navaranjan has a video walkthrough here; and I blogged about how you could use the Swagger definition of the Power BI REST API to create a custom connector here. I’m not going to go over all these steps again but there are a few specifics that need pointing out if you want to build your custom connector manually. If you’re lazy, I exported my custom connector to a Swagger file and you can download it here; you should be able to import it and create your own custom connector very easily.  I don’t pretend to be a Power Automate expert so please excuse any newbie mistakes!

The three endpoints that you’ll need to use to export to a file (unless your report is in your My Workspace, in which case there are three other equivalent endpoints) are Export To File In Group, Get Export To File Status In Group and Get File Of Export To File In Group. There’s good documentation for regular Power BI reports here and paginated reports here, but in summary Export To File In Group starts the export process but because this might take a long time, doesn’t return the exported file; Get Export To File Status In Group allows you to check the status of the export; and Get File Of Export To File In Group returns the file once the export is ready.

Creating a custom connector in Power Automate is a four-step process and steps 1, 2 and 4 (“General”, “Security” and “Test”) are well covered in the guides above. Step 3 (“Definition”) is where you need to create three Actions for the three endpoints above.

After filling in the General and Security pages, go to the Definition page and click the New action button to create an Action for the Export To File In Group endpoint. You first need to fill in the information in the General section:

Then in the Request section click the Import from sample button, select POST and paste

https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/reports/{reportId}/ExportTo

…into the URL box and the sample payload here into the Body box:

Setting up the other two endpoints is similar except that you need to select GET instead of POST and you don’t need to paste anything into the Body box. Here are the two templatised URLs to use for them:

Get Export To File Status In Group: https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/reports/{reportId}/exports/{exportId}

Get File Of Export To File In Group: https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{groupId}/reports/{reportId}/exports/{exportId}/file

There’s more to do on this page, but at this point you should go to the Test page and test these three new Actions. For Export To File In Group you need to at least enter a groupId, a reportId and a format:

The groupId and reportId can be found by navigating to your report in the Power BI portal; you can extract the groupId and reportId from the URL like so:

The valid values for format (and the other parameter values) are in the docs.

Assuming that it all works, you will be able to scroll down and see the response. Copy all the JSON in the Body section and save it somewhere temporarily.

Do the same thing for the other two Actions you have created; these two actions take a third parameter called exportId, which is the id value in the response that I’ve highlighted in the screenshot immediately above.

Once you have the Body text from Export To File In Group and Export To File Status In Group (the response from Get File Of Export To File In Group should be your report export), go back to the Definitions page and for these two Actions scroll down to the Response section and click on Add default response.

There are two things to do here for both Actions. First, paste the responses you got on the Test pane into Body; next, paste:

retry-after 30

…into the Headers section and then click Import. This will make the output of the Actions much easier to consume in Power Automate later on.

Your custom connector is now ready, and in part 2 of this series I’ll show you how to use it in Power Automate.

[Thanks to Jaime Tarquino and Chris Finlan for their help getting this working]