Power BI Rest Api Dataset in Power Bi Desktop

Question

I successfully managed to connect a java application to Power BI REST API and managed to create a dataset and added some data.

I can view this data from Power BI web interface, make reports, graph etc.

Is it possible to connect Power BI Desktop to this datasets and create custom reports from there? I'm asking this because the desktop application seems to be more complete. You can edit column names, merge tables, etc. all things that are not available in the web application.

Thanks all for the help.

Answer 1

The Power BI Desktop does not support connecting to real-time data sets in the Power BI service at this time.

Could you submit this as a request to https://ideas.powerbi.com?

Answer 2

It is possible to use REST API Dataset in Power Bi Desktop since April 2017 and it worked for me in the latest version of Power BI Desktop.

But even though you can create reports based on datasets from Power BI Service, you still cannot edit column names, merge tables, etc.

The features is called Power BI service Live connection.

To establish a connection to the published report, and create your own report based on the published dataset, select Get Data from the Home ribbon in Power BI Desktop, and select Power BI service. You can also select it from Get Data > Online Services > Power BI service.

After the report is finished, you can publish your report by selecting Publish from the Home ribbon in Power BI Desktop.

More details on Power BI documentation page.