Overview of Power BI REST API
Published: December 7, 2015
Updated: July 19, 2016
Power BI displays dashboards that are interactive, and can be created and updated from many different data sources in real time. Just like a dashboard in your car displays important information about your vehicle, such as its speed, its fuel level, or how healthy the engine is, a dashboard in Power BI displays important information about your business.
Create custom Power BI dashboards with real-time data push
Using any programming language that supports REST calls, you can create a business solution that updates a Power BI dashboard in real-time.
With the Power BI REST API, you can:
- Authenticate Power BI REST operations with Azure Active Directory OAuth2
- Create and get datasets
- Set a retention policy to automatically clean up old data
- Get and update table schemas
- Add and delete rows
- Get groups
- Import PBIX or Excel files
- Get tiles
Here's the overall flow for a Power BI app created using the REST API.
Here’s some of the ways you can use the Power BI REST API
Create real-time dashboards from your app -
Uncover real-time insights from devices, sensors and applications. Use the Power BI REST API or Azure Stream Analytics to push data directly from your application into a dataset in Power BI.Check out the Power BI projects on GitHub and our samples - GitHub has many Power BI projects: Go to GitHub and search “Power BI”. Or, take a look at our samples. We have these samples:
- Client app sample: A console app that shows you how to authenticate a client app and call all Power BI operations.
- Web app sample: A web app that shows you how to authenticate a Power BI web app.
Try the Power BI REST API -
In the Apiary interactive API console, you can try all Power BI REST API operations such as Create Dataset and Get Datasets.