Power BI & EDITable deployment pipelines

We will now create a pipeline in both Power BI and EDITable, and walk through the entire deployment process from beginning to end.

In this section, we will deploy the report in stages that use the same destination. This can be useful when you want to maintain version control for your EDITable visuals before sharing the final version of your content with business users across the organization.

1. Set up PowerBI deployment pipeline

The first step is to set up a Power BI pipeline. You can refer to this page to get started.

1. After creating a pipeline, you can assign workspaces to each stage, i.e., the Development/Test/Production stages of the deployment pipeline. Learn more about assigning workspaces.

Assign workspaces

1. Let us assume you have a Power BI report with an EDITABLE visual that you want to deploy in stages. Publish it to the workspace mapped to the first stage (development) of the pipeline.

For this demonstration, we have created a report named 'EmployeeDetails' and uploaded it under the Inforiver - Pipeline - Dev workspace.

Publish to the Development stage

1.1. Deploy report to the next stage

1. Go to the Deployment Pipelines tab and select the required pipeline that you created in step 1.

Deployment pipeline

1. From the first stage, select the report and its corresponding semantic model to be deployed to the test environment and click Deploy. Learn more about deploying reports.

Select items for deployment

1. Review the items that are being deployed and click on the Deploy button.

Start deployment

1. After the deployment is complete, you will be able to see the report and the semantic model in the next stage. In this case, it is the Inforiver - Pipeline - Test workspace.

Deployed to 'Test' workspace

1. Similarly, after the testing stage, you can deploy the report and its semantic model to the production environment by repeating the above steps.

Deploy to next stage

Deployed to production

When deploying reports, please ensure to deploy their corresponding semantic models.

2. Set up EDITable deployment Pipeline

1. In the EDITable workspace, go to Utility > Pipeline. Click on Add Pipeline.

Add Pipeline

1. Click on Add Stage and you can start adding the required stages — Dev, Test and Prod.

Add stages

2.1. Add report to pipeline

1. Click on Add Report.

Add Report

1. A pop-up appears as shown below, based on the number of stages created.

Add report IDs

1. The report IDs can be copied from the address bar of the respective workspaces. The image below illustrates how the report ID can be obtained from the report in the 'Dev' workspace.

Dev Report ID

1. Similarly, enter the report IDs for each workspace report. Click Next.

Enter report IDs for all the 3 workspaces

1. A pop-up window appears, displaying a list of all EDITABLE visuals (tables) included in the selected report.

Our report contains only one visual/table, 'EmployeeDetails'. Click Add to add this report and create an EDITable pipeline.

Add report to the EDITable pipeline stages

Note: In this example, we have deployed the reports to the same destination (Azure SQL) for simplicity. The next section will explain how to configure different deployment destinations.

EDITable pipeline for a report

A report may also contain multiple tables/visuals, one on each page, that can be added to or removed from a pipeline during deployment. You can refer to the image below, where the report has multiple EDITable visuals.

Report with multiple tables/visuals

2.2. Deploy report to the next stage

1. To deploy a report from one stage to another, such as 'Dev' to 'Test' or 'Test' to 'Prod', click the Deploy button next to the report you want to deploy.

Deploy a report

1. Select the next stage for deploying the visual from the dropdown menu.

Choose stage to deploy

1. Click Deploy.

Deploy

1. The report is now deployed from 'Dev' to 'Test' stage. Similarly, after testing, you can deploy the report from the 'Test' to the 'Prod' stage by repeating the above steps.

In the next section, we will look at the steps to deploy the report in stages that use different destinations.