Custom Report 'Expose to API' for PowerBi Usage

[cameron-wilk]

Hello, Lansweeper Community.

I’m currently in the process of creating a series of Power BI dashboards for our various departments to provide them a general overview of the assets within their respective domains. The goal is to make these dashboards as clean and specific as possible, focusing only on relevant assets, and excluding decommissioned, inactive, or irrelevant computers.

I am using the API documentation seen in the Knowledge Base here and have successfully been able to create API calls to our LS Cloud instance on several occasions now. However, there are an odd few thousands of assets that get pulled in with this call, all of varying degrees of states and fields I want to exclude. This led me to create the aforementioned Custom Reports, creating one for each department with the relative filters and state exclusions I want--these look and work great for exactly what I need pulled into Power BI, but I can't. 

I assumed that when exposing a report to the API, and making a direct call to the API in PowerBI, it would create a separate table for these custom reports, much like how the guide creates these data containers: 

But that does not seem to be the case. Even after marking the report as "Exposed to API," there doesn’t seem to be a new entity, container, or obvious way to directly query just that custom report through the API, at least not in PowerBI.

I've found that it may have been required to gather the 'Custom Report ID', so I was able to query using Postman to get this 'authorizedReports' ID for my custom reports; but not sure how this (or the 'Export URL' I've also queried for) are of any help for this use case.  (See here for more details on why I went down this road)

It's entirely possible I am vastly misunderstanding what exactly the 'Expose to API' function is for, and maybe it doesn't have any capacity to work with PowerBI. I am a relative newbie to the API Integration world, so I appreciate any and all ideas or assistance in getting this going. For context, too, I will have an odd 50+ reports that will all have various degrees of filters and exclusions. These reports would be vastly improved by allowing them to connect via/ some form of automatic data request and not manual uploads into Power BI. 

Please let me know if there is any further information I can provide! 

[EthanB]

Hello!

The expose to API function means that you will be able to run that report via the API. This means that when you call the authorizedReports function that you will be able to see all reports that you have exposed via the API as long as you are using the same API client to which you exposed those reports. Once you see which reports you are Authorized to call, then you can execute those reports via the API. This is essentially what it means to have a report "Exposed to API". In terms of the PowerBI integration, you can take those reports that you executed via the API and then import them into PowerBI as an excel file. Furthermore, you can simply download those reports straight from your cloud site as well using the export function in the top right once you click on a report and import that into PowerBI. I would recommend downloading as an Excel file as I have found that easier to import into PowerBI. However, please keep in mind that these reports will be static and only contain the information from when the time they were run. I hope that helps!

For more information on working with reports in the API, please view this page: authorizedReports (query) | Documentation – Lansweeper. If you have any further questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out or to submit a support ticket.

Thanks!

[cameron-wilk]

Hello Ethan, thanks for such a conclusive response on the API! I really appreciate it and was able to learn a lot from it.

I suppose a follow-up question I may have is--what options exist for me to adjust the fields and custom fields that are being pulled in with the PowerBI Lansweeper Dashboard Template as seen in this Knowledge Base from Lansweeper? I ask because it seems the Custom Reports may not be the way forward for us, given the information you provided.

To make these reports helpful, I really need to pull in information like the asset state and a few other custom fields we use; but these are not natively pulled into LS using the template query and any attempt to edit the query to include what I want in the 'getData' function(s) results in error; such as adding 'assetCustom.statename' or otherwise.

Let me know! If I can add even just this one field, the reports will be much more possible. Unfortunately, for our use case, downloading the custom reports as Excel files is just not possible at our scale.

Thanks!