Interactive R custom visuals not displaying in Power BI Desktop

[ojbowden]

Hi

I've tried multiple guides and multiple scripts to create  R custom visuals (such as the link shown below), and all of them seem to end in just a blank, white image showing on my visualiser. Some guides I've followed: 

https://radacad.com/interactive-map-using-r-and-power-bi-create-custom-visual-part-1

https://datakuity.com/2019/06/25/power-bi-create-custom-interactive-visuals-with-r/

What is frustrating me is I am getting no errors, and everything seems to package correctly. Then when I pull in my custom visualiser and turn on the Fields, the visualiser thinks for a second, then turns blank and doesn't show anything. 

This has also been true of sampleRHTMLVisual template:

source('./r_files/flatten_HTML.r')

############### Library Declarations ###############

libraryRequireInstall("ggplot2");

libraryRequireInstall("plotly")
####################################################

################### Actual code ####################

g = qplot(`Petal.Length`, data = iris, fill = `Species`, main = Sys.time());

####################################################

############# Create and save widget ###############

p = ggplotly(g);

internalSaveWidget(p, 'out.html');

####################################################

Could this be I haven't got the correct node_modules installed? I am not getting an error to refer back to at any stage so I am at a loss here. Any help would be much appreciated. 

[v-rzhou-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @ojbowden ,

Please check the Known limitations of R visual in Power BI.

R visuals in Power BI Desktop have the following limitations:

• Data sizes: Data used by an R visual for plotting is limited to 150,000 rows. If more than 150,000 rows are selected, only the top 150,000 rows are used and a message is displayed on the image.

• Output size : R visual has an output size limit of 2MB.

• Resolution: All R visuals are displayed at 72 DPI.

• Plotting device: Only plotting to the default device is supported.

• Calculation times: If an R visual calculation exceeds five minutes, it causes a time-out error.

• Relationships: As with other Power BI Desktop visuals, if data fields from different tables with no defined relationship between them are selected, an error occurs.

• Refreshes: R visuals are refreshed upon data updates, filtering, and highlighting. However, the image itself isn't interactive and can't be the source of cross-filtering.

• Highlights: R visuals respond if you highlight other visuals, but you can't select elements in the R visual to cross filter other elements.

• Display devices: Only plots that are plotted to the R default display device are displayed correctly on the canvas. Avoid explicitly using a different R display device.

• Column renaming: R visuals do not support renaming input columns. Columns will be referred to by their original name during script execution.

• RRO installations: In this release, the 32-bit version of Power BI Desktop doesn't automatically identify RRO installations; you must manually provide the path to the R installation directory in Options and settings > Options > R Scripting.

For reference: Create Power BI visuals using R

And you can check whether you have install and configure R script correctly.

For reference: Run R scripts in Power BI Desktop

Best Regards,
Rico Zhou

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[rowrowrow2]

This answer doesn't really seem to address the issue.