Tutorial: Refresh Power BI dataset before report generation in BI Helper

Use Power Automate and BI Helper to refresh your Power BI dataset before generating and emailing your PDF / PPTX reports.

Reporting automation for Power BI Pro, PPU and Premium.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to refresh a Power BI dataset and then generate user-specific PDF reports in BI Helper.

Prerequisites (follow hyperlinks in each step):

1. Microsoft Power Automate login and a Power BI Pro license.
2. BI Helper login.
3. BI Helper flow template to refresh a Power BI dataset.
4. BI Helper API documentation.

Steps:

1. [BI Helper] Register on BI Helper and create a new job by following steps 1–3 of this tutorial. Note your BI Helper username, password and Job ID.

Job ID: Click on Edit Job (pencil icon) in the BI Helper Job Summary tab to get the Job ID in the URL. Example: In https://portal.bihelper.tech/#/user-jobs/3/edit, the Job ID is 3.

2. [Power Automate] Sign in to Power Automate with your Microsoft login and import this flow template to refresh a Power BI dataset.

Import flow template

3. [Power Automate] After importing the flow template, you will be asked to select your Power BI account. Create a new connection if your Power BI account is not linked to Power Automate.

Important: If you get an error message on importing the Flow, ignore the error and click on My Flows. Refresh the page and you will see the flow in your list.

Link Power Automate to Power BI

4. [Power Automate] Once the BI Helper flow template is imported, go to My Flows and Edit your flow. Make sure to Turn on your flow.

Turn on the flow

5. [Power Automate] In Edit mode, enter the Power BI dataset to be refreshed, BI Helper username, password and Job ID (from step 1).

Edit flow

6. [Power Automate] Save your flow and run it.

Run flow

Whenever the above Flow is run, Power Automate will first refresh the Power BI dataset and then run the downstream BI Helper job to generate and email PDFs. So your users will always see the latest information in their Power BI reports!

The Refresh a Dataset connector will not wait for the refresh to complete before moving to the next step because the above flow does not capture the dataset refresh status - success, failure or in progress. Users need to monitor the dataset and ensure it has refreshed.

To automate this, you can extend the flow to poll the status of the Power BI Dataset Refresh API.

Customizations in BI Helper

You can customize file names, folders, email text and report pages to print. You can generate Excel files for matrix and table visuals, apply multiple slicers and filters or generate PPTX files instead of PDFs.

Finally, you can download the PDF/PPTX reports to your environment and distribute them in different ways instead of sending them as email attachments. Refer to our product documentation for details.

BI Helper

BI Helper bihelper.tech is a simple, secure and cost effective SaaS solution for PDF report distribution in Tableau and Power BI. You only need a single Power BI / Tableau license to generate your PDF reports.

Resource: BI Helper Tutorial | Report Distribution in BI Tools