Edit your data directly from Power BI using PowerApps Part 2 — Building an approval workflow

Last update: Mar 2021

In one of my previous posts, we talked about how you can use PowerApps to edit data directly from your Power BI report. But what if you want that data to be verified before it is actually written back to your data source?

Well, in that case, you probably need to think about how you can build an approval workflow, so that your data is only written back to your data source after someone approves it.

Having this, today we are going to add an extra step to our solution, building an approval workflow using Power Automate. Here is a very simple architecture of our solution:

So, as you can see from the image above, our Power BI report gets it’s data from an Azure SQL database. On the other end, our PowerApp will read the data coming from Power BI, but also from SQL, as we want to be able to write back to our data source.

Once the PowerApp form is submitted, a Power Automate Flow will be triggered. This flow will send an approval request email, which the user needs to reject or approve. Once this request is approved (and only when it’s approved!), your new value will be written back to the database.