Log Analytics contains information on the dataset, report and visual that are associated with a DAX query but that information is in the form of IDs rather than names. Getting the IDs for specific datasets and reports is fairly straightforward – you can get them from urls in the Power BI Portal – and as I wrote here, it’s possible to get a list of IDs and names for the visuals in a report from the JSON file you get when you export from Performance Analyzer in Power BI Desktop. However, my colleague Rui Romano recently showed me a different way to get the same information using the Power BI Embedded Analytics Playgound, which may be an easier option to use in some cases.
The Power BI Embedded Analytics Playground (more details here and here) is a site where developers can learn how to use Power BI’s APIs for embedding reports and dashboards in their own applications. “But Chris!”, I hear you cry, “I’m not using Power BI Embedded!” – don’t worry, this is all about embedding not Power BI Embedded (yes, there’s a difference) so it works with the regular Power BI Service. “I’m not a developer though!”, you add – don’t worry, neither am I and you don’t need to understand any code to do what I’m going to show you.
The first thing you need to do is go to:
https://playground.powerbi.com/en-us/dev-sandbox
When you go there you’ll see the following prompt:
Choose “Select report” under “Use my own Power BI report” and select the report whose visuals you want to get the IDs for.
At this point a page will open with a code editor at the top and your report shown at the bottom. Before you continue you will also need to open the Console pane in your browser’s developer tools. If you’re using Microsoft Edge you can learn how to do this here; if you’re using Chrome you can learn how to do this here.
At this point you should see something like this:
At this point you can start to generate some code by dragging and dropping from the left-hand pane to the code pane in the top-centre of the screen. There are two things you will need to do here: first, generate code to get the report to display the right page and second generate code to get all the visual IDs.
The easiest way to set the page is to generate code to set the page is to expand the Navigation node on the left hand pane and drag the “Page – Set active” item onto the bottom of the code in the code pane. You should then change the page index in the code to select the page; it’s zero-based, so to get the first page you set the index to 0, for the second page set it to 1 and so on.
Next, underneath that code, drag the “Get visuals” item and then click the Run button:
Finally, in the Console pane on the right-hand side of the screen, you’ll see a line was added that you can expand and when you do so, you’ll see the ID, visual type and title of all the visuals on the page:
There’s still a lot of manual work to do but it’s still a fairly easy process. I’m also sure there’s a developer out there who can write a script that can be pasted into the code window that a) loops through all the pages in the report and b) returns the IDs, name and titles in a more friendly format. I’m very impressed with how easy the Embedded Analytics Playground makes all this, though, even for a non-developer like me.
[Edit October 2023 – there’s now an even easier way to get these IDs using Power BI Desktop Developer Mode https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2023/10/22/getting-report-visual-ids-with-power-bi-desktop-developer-mode/ ]
Actually, you can achieve the same result by extracting the pbix container and reading the Report/Layout file. It’s in JSON format and has meta for all visuals.
@Misha can you explane how, step by step
This is really interesting.
Our tool Measure Killer also retrieves the visual IDs from any report analyzed.
We are doing what @Misha is pointing out, getting it from the report layout.