Today I want to show you something a little bit different to my usual content. I want to show you, how you can use Power Automate to get a Power BI Report displayed on a digital signage screen.
The challenge basically was, as most digital signage solutions do not have any good way of authenticating against a modern website using Entra Id as an IdP, I cannot just point the screen to my report and call it a day.
Power BI
Instead, I came across a neat little functionality in Power BI, it lets you subscribe to a report…
That will result in an email, with a screenshot of my report attached to it:
Cool, we could now use that, to send this mail to an email listener that would get the attachment and send it to our digital signage solution… There are just two minor issues with that solution.
First you can only send this mail to a Power BI licensed user within your org, which means we would need to license the account of our email listener or do crazy things like email rules to automatically forward these mails to a different account, which is just going to create issues.
Second, you can only send this report max. once per hour, no option to send the report more frequently.
Power Automate
This is where Power Automate comes in super handy, it has an integrated connector to get these reports directly from Power BI, no need to manage subscriptions or routing mails, no we can directly ask Power BI to send us our report and we can do whatever we want with it.
I will start with an scheduled cloud flow, that gets triggered every 5 minutes:
In here, we can directly create an action “Export To File for Power BI Reports”, that will allow us to get our report:
Digital signage
For this demo, I will use Samsungs MagicInfo 9 as my digital signage solution, but it should be pretty similar for other digital signage solutions.
The first call to MagicInfo in my case is a call to get an auth token: (Obviously in a prod environment, you should store your credentials somewhere secure, e.g. in an Azure Key Vault and not in clear text in the request…)
With this request, we get an auth token, that we then can finally use to upload our content:
To upload our report, we just need to parse our auth token from the result of the first HTTP post and add it to our second request, twhich will actually upload the image:
As we can see, the flow ran successfully:
And the report is ready in MagicInfo for me to publish to a display:
Conclusion
Using a low code platform as Power Automate to feed data into our digital signage system can be a real powerful solution to close the gap between the signage world, that often lacks the possibility to authenticate against modern resources and has the potential to eliminate the need for windows based kiosk pcs just to display a single picture on a screen.
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