How to see the DOM of a custom R HTML visual?

[Anonymous]

Hello,

  In this question, the OP is able to see the DOM of a custom visual in an iframe. How can we do that? I'm doing custom R HTML visuals with pbiviz.

[Anonymous]

Ah ok, I can open the report on app.power.bi.com, and here I have "Inspect element".

[WZorn · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous ,

I am developing a custom visualization from scratch.  In order to run and view your visualization that's under development, there are quite a few steps you go through to "link" your local development environment to powerbi.com.  The viewing of the custom visualization is done by editing a powerbi file that has been uploaded and adding the "developer visual".

To see the DOM of your R visual, I don't see a reason why you couldn't upload your Power BI analysis file to your workspace on powerbi.com.   Viewing your visualization there, will allow you to use the browsers developer tools to inspect the DOM and even see possible errors in the console.

Hope this helps.  I know that's a lot of work to see the DOM, but there is no way of viewing it that I know of in the desktop software.

William

[dm-p]

To add to this, R visuals are a little different to regular (TypeScript) visuals. There is boilerplate TypeScript code that hosts the visual, just like a regular one, but the R code is delegated elsewhere (local R on your machine, or a MS-hosted version of R in the Service).

With the visual DOM, you can indeed inspect the visual in the Service using your browser tools.

For a standard R visual, this is a static image that is base64 encoded, e.g.:

For an RHTML visual, Power BI will convert the resulting respons from the R interpreter and add the generated HTML to the DOM, e.g.:

Daniel