Power BI Composite Models - Permissions & Premium

mostvp123 · ‎06-22-2022

There was a well known limitation with Power BI Composite models, where if a composite model published to Workspace A was connected to a dataset in Workspace B, and had an additional local table, then an end user without Build permissions to Dataset in workspace B would only see the local table data, and in the Service see an error message on visuals using Workspace B data.
Microsoft released a communication that this has now changed for premium workspaces / PPU: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/update-to-required-permissions-when-using-composite-models-...
Apparently, the Viewer role / Read permissions will now work just fine.

However, a few things are not clear here.
1) What does this mean for the "App" permissions? I.e. if workspace B is published to an App, and a user is granted access to the App, not the workspace - would they be able to see data in a composite model connected to this workspace? Or do we need to make sure a user has access to both the App and the workspace as a Viewer or the dataset in the workspace as Read?
2) Do all workspaces have to be premium? Or just the workspace where the composite model is published?

Thank you for any help on this 🙂

mostvp123 · ‎06-27-2022

@v-jayw-msft I've tested this now.

Firstly, regarding #2 - while the final composite dataset needs to be in a premium workspace - the underlying datasets do not. So creating a composite dataset in a premium workspace, which is connected to datasets in non-premium workspaces works! Not sure what you meant in your response to #1, but it does seem that "App" permissions to the underlying dataset (those that are granted automatically to every dataset in a workspace when granting App access only to someone) are equivalent to "Read" permissions, and hence are enough to make tiles using the underlying dataset work fine.