Power BI Embedded Update Report API

The Clone Report and Clone Tile and Dashboard APIs enable the copying of content so that multiple customers can get analytics on their data with minimal API calls. A newly released API now supports updating reports.

If you're an independent software vendor (ISV) with multiple customers, or if your organization has different departments, you can hold a copy of the report connected to different data for each of them. We highly recommend saving analytical content for different customers or departments in separate workspaces.

Let’s assume you have 20 customers (or 20 departments). You clone and rebind the source report 20 times to give each customer their own view of the data in a dedicated workspace. Now you want to change the source report, fix some small bugs, and add some customer requirements. By using the new API, you can automatically update all reports that were created from the same source report, while keeping the original report ID used for embedding and sharing. This means there's no effect on your code when you want to improve your reports.

The benefits of this operation go beyond cloned/imported reports. You can update a target report by providing any source report, as long as the dataset schema complies with the update. The dataset itself in the target report will not change, and the updated report will continue to be linked to the previous dataset.

Note that an update operation changes the entire content of the report. Any visual/page that is not on the source report will be deleted after the operation takes place. We highly recommend that you keep the source and target IDs of all objects you're cloning, so that the update operation can be done easily and with minimal errors.