Power BI Tutorial: Data-Driven Scheduling

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This demo will show you how to run a data-driven schedule. For this example, the data-driven schedule will run a single Power BI report for all the suppliers in our database where their country is USA. The report will be outputted to a folder on the laptop, and each of the suppliers will have their own folder created at the point of the report execution. To begin, we will select data-driven for Power BI, and the first thing that we have to do is connect to the database which holds the supplier information. We will select the DSM that we will use to do that, and click connect. The table that holds the required information information is suppliers, and we are only going to run it for the suppliers where their country is equal to USA. Click okay to save the DSM.

The key column for this example is going to be supplier ID, and that's because that is unique for each suppliers in the database. Click next. We will select the Power BI account that we want to use, and the report that we will run is supplier analysis. The schedule name is default, the report name and click next to continue. This is the scheduling tab, and we are going to run this report every day, so daily is selected and we will change this to be 7:00 PM. For more information on the scheduling options available, please view the scheduling demo. Click next to save.

This is the report settings tab, and if you want to make any changes to the report settings, the page height or the page width for example, you would simply click and make a change. For this example we will accept the default, so we are not going to make any changes, so just click next to save that information. This brings you to the report filters tab. When you do a single schedule, normally you may have a static filter, maybe one or two filters. This is a data-driven schedule, so we will use a data driver for the filters. What that means is we will create a filter so that it's going to run through the database for all the suppliers that meet the criteria that we set a few moments ago.

To do that, just click add. The table that we will use is suppliers, the column is going to be company name, and the data type is string, so we will click to accept those. Then, instead of writing in a static value, we will use the inserts so we can simply drag and drop the company name and then click add. Instead of having one company or two companies, this is going to run this report for all the company names in the database that match the criteria. Click next to save that information.

This brings you to the refresh datasets. If you want to refresh the dataset before the report runs, you would do that here. After that you will see the destinations tab. For this example we will set up a disk destination, so we'll click add disk. Next is the folder, and for this we want to make a slight change to this folder path, so we will just highlight it, use the up arrow so that we can edit it and we create a folder for each of the companies in the database so when the report is run, each company will have a folder with their individual name. Then use the down arrow to save that path. The format that we will use for this is PDF, and then just click okay to save it. That brings you to the exception handling. For more information on exception handling, please view the exception handling demo. Same with custom actions, for more information on these actions, please view the custom actions demo.

Next we just need to click finish to save the schedule. This will take a few moments. To show you the result of a data-driven schedule, we will simply right click and manually execute this schedule, and then we can have a look at the reports. Once the schedule is completed, you can see the resulting reports. You will notice we have a folder for each of the American companies, company ID, and the resulting PDF.

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