Tag Archives: Swagger

C# Wrapper for Power BI REST API

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UPDATE 2017-05-18:
I released a new version of this project and also published it on GitHub: https://github.com/gbrueckl/PowerBI.API.Client
A blog post which refers to the updates can be found here.

Since the last major update last year, Power BI offers some APIs which can be used to interact with content and also data that is stored in Power BI. Microsoft provides a good set of samples on how to use the APIs on GitHub and also a an interactive APIARY web-UI which you can use to build and test API calls on-the-fly. However, it can still be quite cumbersome as you have to deal with all the REST API calls and the returned JSON on your own. So I decided to write a little C# Wrapper where you simply pass in your Azure AD Application Client ID and you can deal with all Object of the Power BI API as they were regular C# objects.

Here is a little example on how to list all available reports and get the EmbedURL of a given tile using the PowerBIClient:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using pmOne.PowerBI;
using pmOne.PowerBI.PowerBIObjects;

namespace SampleApplication
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            PowerBIClient pbic = new PowerBIClient(“ef4aed1a-9cab-4bb3-94ea-ffffffffffff”);

            Console.WriteLine(“Available Reports:”);
            foreach(PBIReport pbir in pbic.Reports)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(pbir.Name);
            }

            Console.WriteLine();
            Console.WriteLine(“Get EmbedURL for Tile [Retail Analysis Sample].[This Year’s Sales]”);
            Console.WriteLine(pbic.GetDashboardByName(“Retail Analysis Sample”).GetTileByName(“This Year’s Sales”).EmbedURL);

            Console.WriteLine(“Press <Enter> to exit …”);
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

As you can see, its pretty simple and very easy to use, even for non-developers. You can find all the source-code and the sample application for download below. The code as I have written it is very likely not the best code possible, but it works for my needs, is straight forward, simple and saves me a lot of work and time when dealing with the PowerBI API. Also, if the API changes, you may need to adopt the code accordingly. However, for the future I hope that Microsoft provides some metadata so that VisualStudio can build all this code automatically using e.g. Swagger. But for the time being feel free to use, improve or extend my code Smile

SourceCode: PowerBIClient_Source.zip