Microsoft Power BI
Askel connects to your customer's Power BI workspace and lets your product refresh datasets, read report metadata, and push row data into streaming datasets in the business intelligence environment their analysts use.
What you can do
Trigger dataset refreshes on demand
Call the Power BI datasets refreshes endpoint to kick off a refresh of any dataset in the customer's workspace, triggered by events in your product rather than a fixed schedule.
Push rows to a streaming dataset
Use the push datasets rows endpoint to stream new records directly into a Power BI Push Dataset in real time, without any intermediate file export.
Read workspace and dataset metadata
List workspaces, datasets, and reports the connecting user can access, so your product can surface a picker for the customer to select the right target.
Check refresh status and history
Fetch the refresh history for a dataset to determine whether the last refresh succeeded, failed, or is still in progress, and surface that status in your product.
Read report embed tokens
Generate an embed token for a report using the Power BI embed API, allowing your product to embed live Power BI reports in your own UI.
Manage workspace permissions
Add or update workspace members via the Power BI admin endpoints, useful for provisioning access to a customer's shared workspace when onboarding new users.
Triggering a Power BI dataset refresh when your product's data pipeline completes
You sell a logistics analytics platform. Ironwood Freight runs all their executive dashboards in Power BI, pulling from a dataset connected to your product's data export. Every time your product finishes a nightly data pipeline, Ironwood's Power BI dataset should refresh automatically so dashboards show the latest numbers.
- 1
Connect via Microsoft
Ironwood's Power BI admin clicks Connect Power BI in your product. The Microsoft consent screen requests the Dataset.ReadWrite.All scope; the admin approves. Askel stores the refresh token.
- 2
Identify the target dataset
Askel calls the Power BI datasets endpoint to list datasets in Ironwood's workspace. Your CS team picks the Logistics Operations dataset as the target.
- 3
Configure the trigger
In your product's workflow editor, your team sets the Power BI Refresh step to fire after the nightly pipeline completion event. The dataset ID is stored on the workflow.
- 4
Trigger the refresh
When the pipeline completes at 03:00, your product fires the workflow. Askel calls the Power BI refreshes endpoint for the configured dataset ID.
- 5
Monitor and report status
Askel polls the refresh history every two minutes until the refresh reaches Completed or Failed. Your product logs the result and sends a summary to Ironwood's data team.
OAuth 2.0
The customer's Microsoft 365 user completes the Azure AD OAuth consent flow, approving the Power BI service scopes for dataset and workspace access. Askel stores the refresh token and handles silent renewal. If the tenant requires admin consent for Power BI scopes, Askel provides a tenant-admin consent URL. Service principal authentication is also available for non-interactive scenarios; contact your Askel account team to configure that variant.
How Askel sits between your product and the customer's system
FAQ for Microsoft Power BI
Which Power BI licences are required?+
What is the difference between a push dataset and a scheduled refresh?+
Can we embed Power BI reports inside our product?+
What happens if the dataset refresh fails?+
catching drift before it breaks, and hitting go-live dates.
© 2025 Askel.ai. All rights reserved.