Pulling Report data filtered by backend user permissions

[repl-satyveer-s]

First time powerbi user. Wanted to validate my approach to one of the problems am facing while embedding a powerbi report into a company webpage.

Scenario:

We have integrated a powerbi report on one of our site's page. The page shows analytics data that is filtered according to user's role and permission in the website's backend.

To achieve the same result for powerbi report, I basically created copies of the master report and duplicated the report's backing dataset. Each of the dataset basically has a user specific accesstoken that allows the dataset to pull only user specific data.

Master Report - master Dataset with parameter 'access-token.

UserA - UserA copy of report - UserA copy of dataset with access-token=userATokenvalue.

UserB - UserB copy of report - UserB copy of dataset with access-token=userATokenvalue.

.

.

repeat this for all users in the system.

At this point I am thinking, this is a stupid way to provision users and configure reports for them. I do not know how to do this better. Any nudge, push, is welcome.

Note:

I am aware of row level filtering of data in power-bi reports but that is not an option for us as we cannot pull roles to filterby in the dataset.

We have the 'App Owns Data' scenario usage.

[v-jiascu-msft]

Hi @repl-satyveer-s,

RLS (row level security) could be the best choice. Why can't you do that? Please refer to embedded-row-level-security and service-admin-rls.

What's your scenario? App Owns Data or User Owns Data.

Best Regards,

Dale

[repl-satyveer-s]

Thanks for the reply.

So our scenario is 'App owns data'.

Say the dataset returns rows of 'project' information. The access to any project object is a determined in the backend by a complex logic of user's permission, role, per-object access etc.

For instance, if we have ProjectA, ProjectB, ProjectC in the system a user can have access to any permutation and combinatin of that set depending upon access roles, rules defined elsewhere in the backend. It is not possible to import all that into report dataset.