Best way to expose my data to Power BI?

[redec]

Hi, I'm a developer for a saas company, and we want to provide a mechanism for our customers to easily get their data into PowerBI.  Unfortunately I personally have no experience with powerbi, and I'm having a bit of a hard time figuring out what the "proper" way is to do this.  In docs I can find references to apps, content-packs, REST data-push APIs, and installable data connectors for desktop...which all seem to be possible options.  *Ideally* (I think) I'd want a way to log the user into our system (via oauth2) and then present them with available data sets, with pre-canned connections/relationships and possibly pre-built dashboards/visualizations etc which they can pick/choose/customize as they see fit.  From what I've seen "apps" seem the closest to this, however it seems apps are largely just for internal organization use, and I can't find any resources or mechanism to publish a 3rd party app to enable users to connect to their data in an external system....also unsure if apps work for powerbi desktop, or if they're an online-only thing.  Can anyone offer a little guidance?  Thanks!

[Greg_Deckler]

This is a pretty wide-ranging question and is really going to probably depend on exactly what you are trying to accomplish and what data you are trying to marry their data to. You also have Power BI Templates (pbit) files that can be created in the Desktop.

From reading your description, it may make sense to create your Power BI data model and then have your customers connect to this "Live". They could then marry up their internal data to this using an import of their own data thereby creating a composite model.

[arun_y]

'create your Power BI data model'

Hi @Greg_Deckler , is there a way to self-host a Power BI data model to allow live connections, or do they have to be uploaded to the Power BI Cloud service. In that case, you would probably need to create a separate data model for each SaaS client, right?

[redec]

Yeah, I'm not trying to marry their data to anything in particular...I just want my customers to be able to easily connect and work with their data (sourced from my system) in PBI.  I could just provide the ability for them to generate big csv exports from my system that they then need to import into PBI, but I'd like to deliver something a little cleaner/easier/friendlier than that.  It looks like a published "Template App" on AppSource is probably what I'm looking for...although it appears that will not work for desktop users and requires a "pro" license, which may be an issue for my customers, I don't know.  I will continue digging/playing.

[luisrh]

My suggestion is that you create an OData endpoint.   Look at the sample WebAPI implementations for examples.

OData is a first class citizen for Power BI,  Excel,  Flow,  Analyis Services Tabular models  and also can be used by other tools.   You want to stick with a web service based solution,  not CSV or Excel since loading data for customers is multiple steps, etc...