Pattern for supporting customisable fields

[robtaylor]

Hi,

I work for a company which produces an app for an existing product which is in the azure marketplace. The product contains a "Account" table which allows custom fields to be created by our customers. For example, I might want to add a field for "Priority" to show how important the account is. Each one of our customers has their own database, and can configure whichever custom fields they like.

We have a feature request to support the custom fields inside out Power BI App - i.e. being able to filter data in the report by these fields which could be different across customers. I can immediately see problems with building an app on a dataset with changing field names underneath and it not working properly. My question is, has anyone done this - or has a pattern/suggestion for how to tackle it. I have no issues storing/surfacing the data in any format required, this is purely related to getting it working in PowerBI.

The approach that jumps out is to add an "AccountExtensions" table to the model, which looks something like this;

CustomerID	CustomField1	CustomField2	CustomField3
1	xxx	xxx	xxx
2	xxx	xxx	xxx

And then use those fields as filters in the reports - I am wondering if there is a more established pattern for doing this which I don't know about?

Happy to answer clarifying questions 🙂

thanks,

Rob

[v-eachen-msft]

Hi @robtaylor ,

According to your situation, you could use RLS. Here are the documents for your reference.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-rls

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-admin-rls

[robtaylor]

Thanks for the reply @v-eachen-msft 

So RLS doesnt help me, the issue is not restricting data in a single dataset across customers. 

I have 1 app which I publish. Each customer has a database. They install the app from the marketplace and connect to their own instance of the database. They can then report on the data. Every customer has their own app install.

What I want to do is allow each customer to install this app, and see their own custom fields, but only publish the single instance of the app?

thanks,

Rob