Using Power BI Desktop

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You can load data from several reports in IBM® ESG Suite into Microsoft Power BI Desktop by using the Envizi ESG Suite APIs.

About this task

Data is returned in string format from the Envizi ESG Suite API. When you load data from Envizi ESG Suite, perform the following updates as a minimum:
  1. Change the data type of all date-related columns to the data type.
  2. Change the data type of all number columns to the numeric data type, which represents, for example, decimal numbers, whole numbers.
Note:
  • It might take some time for the data from the Envizi ESG Suite API to be populated in the Power BI. It depends on the amount of data that you are loading.
  • If you use the same login user name on multiple production servers, you will likely encounter a 401 Unauthorized error when using API tokens to connect to the platform. This is a security feature and you require a separate login with a unique user name to generate API tokens.
  • Power BI employs a default time out setting for web service API calls. If your API query is large and requires more time than usual to download the data, you can increase the time out setting in the Command timeout in minutes field in the Advanced form in 3.

Procedure

  1. Open Microsoft Power BI Desktop
  2. From the main menu, click Data > From Web.
  3. Select the Advanced radio button and click OK.
  4. Provider your JWT bearer token. In the HTTP request header parameters field, select Authorization and enter Bearer followed by a space and then your access token. For example:
    Bearer bd516f6f775a5f17a2b75db851ec
  5. Access web content anonymously. In the Access Web content dialog, choose Anonymous and click Connect.
    The Query Editor opens and the data loads.
    If you do not see this dialog, you might have previously used your username and password to access the request URL. You must remove any credentials that you have saved previously in Microsoft Power BI before you can use the JWT tokens to access the APIs. Go to Transform data > Data Source Settings > Global permissions. Select the request URL that you will use to access the Envizi ESG Suite APIs, and click Clear permissions.Then, reconnect to the API URL by using your JWT token.
  6. On the Transform tab, click To Table.
  7. In the To Table dialog, click OK.
    Your data is currently organized in a single column.
  8. Click the two-way expansion arrow in the column header.
  9. Deselect the Use original column name as prefix checkbox and click OK.
    The data displays in tabular format in the Query Editor.
  10. Use Power Query transform operations to arrange your data, for example, rename columns, reorder columns, or change the data types of columns.
    For more information about these changes, see the About this task section.
  11. Save the query to populate the Power BI data model with the data.
  12. Use multiple API queries to build your own Power BI report, just as you would do for any Power BI project.