Sharing Dashboards that have RLS applied to individuals outside organisation

[minh23tran]

In regards to our Power BI issue we are having difficulty understanding the security configuration required for our customers. Let me first explain how we are setup and perhaps from explaining things from the beginning you can point out any issues you see along the way.

1. We have multiple customers all which have their own Azure SQL database. Every one of those databases have a dataset in Power BI.

2. Dashboards can either be created by our staff, or be created by the customers.

3. The dashboards that we create are shared for every one of the customers.

Naturally, we don't want to have to manage duplicate dashboards for each of the customers. Instead we'd rather have a single dashboard that can open up the corresponding dataset depending on which user is accessing it. I understand that RLS allows a filtering query to be used to get the correct data based on the user so we rolled up all the data into one db and it works perfectly for individuals within the organization. Our clients aren't within our organization though, so what are the options currently available? 

Dashboard 1 --> figure out which user is accessing it --> change the dataset to their home dataset

That way, customer data is physically separated by different SQL databases and as the number of dashboards grow that we give to all customers the amount of maintenance is minimized.

[celcius]

Old post I know but I read this and thought of a solution. If you create a merged view of the data from each database either by appending each set of data in power bi or using a SQL view to merge them beforehand. Then you could use RLS to restrict the users access.

[AlexChen]

Hi,

I have to say external sharing is not currently supported with datasets that using RLS.

Please reference the “Limitations” in this article https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-admin-rls/.

You can also take a look at this similar case: http://community.powerbi.com/t5/Service/Is-External-sharing-possible-with-data-set-that-use-RLS/m-p/....

Best Regards

Alex

[greggyb · Accepted solution]

RLS cannot change the dataset. It can restrict the rows considered within a single dataset. RLS within Power BI is not ready for primetime yet, in my opinion. It does not even apply in a workspace where an end user has edit permissions ... like their own "My Workspace".

RLS in SSAS is much more robust and supported in Power BI. This is the route I would continue to suggest for now to utilize role-based security in Power BI reports.

Regardless of RLS in Power BI improving, the functionality is not there to support the type of parameterization of datasets that you'd like to see. PBI RLS and SSAS RLS would require a single-tenant solution.