Create App from "My Workspace"?

[PaulDBrown]

Good evening community,

I have a couple of issues on which I beg for help!

1. I need some help in my first attempt at publishing an App. I have been doing some searching & watching videos but I cannot seem to publish an App from "My Workspace", and I have tried a number of things.

From what I gather, in order to be able to publish an App, I need to create an App Workspace first. The problem I'm having is that the Dashboards, Reports and Dataset were all created in "My Workspace" and I cannot find a way to "copy" all these into a new App Workspace. I have tried creating a Organisation Content Pack, which I then managed to "import" into a new App Worksapce, but when I then try to publish the app I'm denied the possibility (something to do with not being able to publish an app from an organisation content pack). 

So how do I go about creating an App from "My Workspace"? Does it even make sense to replicate the content in a new App workspace in order to be able to publish an App?

2. I created a second report in My Workspace using the dataset already published in a previous report. When I go to publish this new report (from Power BI Desktop), I am not given the option of choosing to which workspace I can publish it: it defaults to the same workspace the original dataset was in (which makes sense), but now that I want to create an app which includes this new report, how do I get to include it in an App Workspace (see issue number 1 above)

Many thanks for your help,

Paul.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@PaulDBrown The only method I am aware of to copy your information to another workspace requires powershell and API calls.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/duplicate-workspaces-using-the-power-bi-rest-apis-a-step-by...

To your second question, the behaviour you explain is expected. When you connect to a dataset in a workspace, you are locked into the workspace.

The only other alternative would be to re-deploy the PBIX files to another workspace, but that assumes that you started there. If you did create the reports via PBIX files, you could also download the reports from the Service as PBIX files and publish to a different App Workspace.

[PaulDBrown · Accepted solution]

Thank you @Seth_C_Bauer,

I finally got me head round it all. What I ended up doing was creating a new App workspace an left it empty. Then I published my first report from PBI Desktop (with the original dataset) into the new App workspace. Since the Dataset for the second report is the same, I then changed the source of the Dataset for my second report to that published in the new App Workspace. This then allowed me to publish the second report to the new App Workspace.

The only real nuisance (apart from spending a couple of hours this morning trying to create this App workspace via organization content packs and then importing them into the new App Workspace - but this wouldn't allow me to publish an App etc...), was that I had to create the original dashboard (which was orginally in "My Workspace") from scratch, but it only took a few minutes.

So now I have the App I was looking for in the first place, although I have to ponder on if it is worth keeping all the duplicate stuff within "My Workspace"...

I must say that all this is very unintuitive. Why can't you create Apps from "My Worskpace"???

Thanks again for taking time to helping me out.

Regards,

Paul.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@PaulDBrown Glad you got things sorted. I'm actually glad that they didn't light up the feature to publish an App from a personal workspace. Although my guess is to keep the licensing story more straightforward. The reason is because if you are sharing information to multiple people it is never a good idea to do that from a personal workspace. Because the content is stuck in a single account that is tied to your credentials. If you or someone else leaves and the account is disabled, you would never know where the content comes from or have to go to great lengths to search it all down and do exactly what you just had to in moving it elsewhere. In the App workspace, there can be multiple owners and it doesn't matter who comes and goes, the content can be managed from a singular location by many.

[v-yuezhe-msft]

@PaulDBrown,

App workspace is the only place where we can create/publish apps, for more details, please review the following official article.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-create-distribute-apps

Regards,
Lydia