Embedding a PowerBI report into an Appraisd form

If your organisation uses Microsoft PowerBI to provide reports for employees, you may want to embed a PowerBI report into a form on Appraisd to bring together relevant data at the time of a review.

For example, a sales team might use PowerBI to report on sales achievements and will want to see a report of the sales figures during their quarterly reviews on Appraisd.

You can do this in Appraisd by embedding an IFrame in your form, much like you might embed a Youtube video.

Here's an example of how an Appraisd check-in might look with PowerBI embedded:

How does it work?

When you embed a PowerBI report into a form in Appraisd, no data is actually transferred to Appraisd. So, you won't find any sales figures appearing in the Appraisd reporting tools, for example. All the data remains in PowerBI. That's because you're simply providing a convenient means for users to see their PowerBI data on one screen, which is not the same as actually moving data from PowerBI into Appraisd (this would be called an 'integration').

Prerequisites

You must have the correct license for PowerBI.

Your report must have a single URL (as opposed to different URLs for different people), and use Row Level Security to show the right data to the right people.

You must store an employee ID against each used in Appraisd that is also available in your PowerBI data.

You will most likely need to implement a URL parameter on your report which Appraisd will populate with the appraisee's EmployeeID. You'll then need to configure your PowerBI report to use the EmployeeID to show the right data on each review form.

Remember that the PowerBI data for an individual needs to be accessible to the individual themselves AND the manager or person supervising the reviews. When the manager opens the employee's review, he or she will also want to see the employee's sales figures.

It's not essential, but you will want to use Single Sign On for PowerBI embedded reports to work well. If you don't implement Single Sign On for PowerBI, your users will be asked to sign in to PowerBI separately from signing in to Appraisd.

Example

In this example, we want to show the employee's sales figures on the screen when conducting the employee's review.

First, create a simple PowerBI report (refer to your own/Microsoft documentation for this) to display all the sales figures using Row Level Security. When you view the report, you should see the sales figures for your direct reports and yourself. Make sure that each employee's EmployeeID is available in the data source.

Now add a URL parameter to your PowerBI report, which you can call something like EMPLOYEEID. Modify your PowerBI report so that the sales figures are filtered according to this parameter. Now when you look at the report you should only see the sales figures for the person specified by the EmployeeID. You should be looking at a URL along these lines:

https://app.powerbi.com/reportEmbed?reportId=xxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxx&filter=EMPLOYEEID eq 12345

Note here that 12345 is an example of an EmployeeID from the fictional database.

Now that PowerBI is fully ready, we can look at the next steps in Appraisd.

• In your review form, add a new question. It needs to be the type Plain Text/HTML.
  For the title, give it a title such as "Your sales figures".
  In the details box, paste in this HTML, ensuring your replace the URL with your own PowerBI URL:

<iframe src="https://app.powerbi.com/reportEmbed?xxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxautoAuth=true&filter=EMPLOYEEID%20eq%20{appraiseeemployeeid}"style="width:125%;height:800px" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

Please note the merge term {appraiseeemployeeid} has been entered instead of 12345. When Appraisd sees {appraiseeemployeeid}, it will replace it with the appraisee's employee ID. This causes the PowerBI system to filter its data and show the relevant results to the user on the screen.

We really recommend reading this help page from Microsoft on embedding PowerBI which explains how to get the iframe HTML code.

Additional notes

• In the HTML that there is a parameter for the height of the report (in this case 800 pixels). You may want to increase or decrease this to fit the shape of your PowerBI report.
• There's no limit to the number of PowerBI reports that you can embed in a form, which allows you to split reports over several form sections if you'd like to.
• Because the data is not stored in Appraisd, the PowerBI report will most likely only show the most up to date version of the data. This can be confusing when looking at historic review reports in Appraisd, because the data will look like it's changed. There is, however, review date parameters that you can append to the URL which could be configured in your PowerBI report to filter your data to show only the relevant data for the review in question. The review date parameter can be added by using these merge term in whichever format is right for your report filters:

  {ddueday}

  {dduemonth}

  {ddueyear}
  
  More info on merge terms is available here.
  
  

• It's important to let users know that this is just a tool for convenience and not meant to be used as a record of what the data was at that time. If you do want to keep a snapshot record at the time, you'll need to print the report out.
• You cannot save a report as a PDF using the Appraisd PDF report generator (because, again, Appraisd does not get access to your PowerBI data and therefore cannot create a PDF report for you). Instead, use your browser's print to PDF button.
• While we can provide support and training on the merge terms and IFRAME configuration, we cannot provide advice on how to create your own PowerBI reports and dashboards.