Data from content packs in Power BI Desktop?

[otravers]

Hi,

I just want to make sure I understand properly the current limitations with regards to available sources in PBI Desktop vs. powerbi.com. Here's my understanding of where we're at as of April 2017:

1. Some sources are available from Get Data > Content Pack Library > Services at powerbi.com but are NOT available from Get Data in PBI Desktop. Example: Xero.

2. File > Download report (Preview) is NOT available in powerbi.com for data not originating from a desktop pbix file.

3. Ergo, sources only available at powerbi.com cannot be access and further worked on (ETL / modeling) in PBI Desktop.

Is this correct? Which would mean that there is no way to get, say, Xero data (and other PBI desktop "orphans") to manipulate it with Power Query and Power Pivot on the desktop.

[karaoan]

@otravers You might want to look at Acterys https://www.acterys.com/xero It enables users to add one or more entities from Xero (and combine with other accounting systems) to a professional analytics environment. Users can access the data from Power BI Desktop with all features (e.g. Power Query), Excel or other front ends for completely flexible reporting, interactive dashboards, AI driven insights and planning/forecasting on either single entities or consolidate as many companies as required (even from different accounting systems). This video explains how it works: https://goo.gl/ncQraa

[otravers]

@karaoan thanks. I started using Stitch to load data in BigQuery from Xero and other sources that don't have a proper PBI connector.

[v-caliao-msft]

@otravers,

Theoretically, we can get the data from any datasource in Power BI desktop which you can get in Power BI services by using your datasoruce API. Here is a blog which show you how to get data from Twitter API. Please refer to the link below.
https://chris.koester.io/index.php/2015/07/16/get-data-from-twitter-api-with-power-query/

Similary, you can get data from Xero by using it's own API.

Regards,

Charlie Liao

[otravers]

Yes, I'm aware, I've used the method described in that entry for Twitter searches and other sources where a connector is not available. But this doesn't provide a visual explorer of the data source to build queries.

[THEG72]

@otravers

The content packs are limited if you want anything custom. You can download the MYOB Content pack into Power BI directly and review the code in the desktop.

The Xero documentation advises you what tables and fields you can access. Your right, API wont return a table view as such. You need to return the data in Json or XML and expand out the tables using some M code. Its not an easy task as you need to probably dive into creating your own M connector for Xero.

It all depends what you are trying to do? What data are you after?