Power BI Source Control using Power BI API

While self-service is an easy way of creating and changing existing reports, organizations may struggle with version control of the reports that are published to a Power BI service. We’ve often heard the sentence “Sh**, I’ve overwritten one of my important reports!”. Yes, this problem can also occur to experienced developers and even consultants of Lytix. In most development environments you can setup version-control to keep track of your changes, and in operational systems a daily backup is taken. Power BI Service however, doesn’t support version control (*)! Despite a ton of ideas have been posted to provide source/version control for reports, I couldn’t really find any on the backlog or planned to integrate with Power BI.

This article describes a way of setting-up your own source control by using the Power BI API to export all reports of all workspaces. Having a local copy of your database may come-in handy for those organizations which need to be adhere to any compliancy (e.g. SOX compliancy, regulatory requirements) or those that just want to revert loss of data/effort.