[RESOLVED] Can I embed a PowerBI report in a WPF app - like SSRS in Local Processing Mode?

Hi All

I'm after a bit of steer before I go tearing off down a blind alley.

A bit of context: I have an app that does water resource modelling. Basically, you build a model of a water resource network and you can then run the model for a number of years, feeding in various rainfall scenarios and it will track how much water ends up where, that no reservoirs are left empty, that demand centres (typically cities) get enough water to meet their needs etc. (It's actually way more advanced than I'm making it sound but that should be sufficient to portray the idea).

The point is that the data this app produces is single use - it's not persisted in a database or anything like that. One run of the model will produce a bunch of data that will be thrown away after a user has finished looking at it. It's basically a bunch of in memory arrays. If you want to get the data back again you would simply run the model again with the same inputs. It's also completely stand alone. It runs on a single desktop and doesn't depend on any network/cloud architecture - this is important in our case.

After a model run we often want to visualise the data in a number of ways as graphs, heatmaps etc. In the past we've done this with our own implemented charts (actually based on SyncFusion charts) but they're a bit clunky and not particularly flexible. We'd like to replace them with something better. Ideally we'd like a user to be able to roll their own visualisations on the fly.

Another section of the company has been looking in to Power BI and I loved the visualisations they were able to show me. I also love that, given a predefined set of data, it would be reasonably simple for a user to create their own visualisations. But my early investigations seem to be implying that this is geared very much to a cloud based implementation. It seems like you need a PowerBI server, which is based on Azure, requires Azure accounts etc. If so that's a non-starter for my use case. Can anyone advise on whether it's suitable to me?

I guess what I'm really looking for is the equivalent of the old SSRS Report View being used in Local Processing Mode (see here) but ideally with some capability for a user to dynamically create a visualisation. And Data Sources cannot be remote, e.g. a conventional database, but must be the in memory data generated by the app.

Any suggestions?

N.b. I came across Power BI Embedded. A lot of the marketing gumph implies it will work the way I want but I'm finding it hard to get at technical detail to confirm it without going through a whole trial installation etc. If anyone's ever used it I'd be interested to hear their thoughts.

Hi Funky,

I did some work in Power BI, and the long and short of it is no databse (in whatever form) no Power BI (unless your data is in excel, csv or xml)

I know Qlik Sense has 'n in memory data engine..

Never tried it but https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/report-server/ might get round the need for Azure etc.

You could probably drive the report from C# via the API but I am sort of speculating wildly on this one.

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no databse (in whatever form) no Power BI (unless your data is in excel, csv or xml)

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Yeah, that was pretty much what I was reading but it's always hard to be sure from reading other peoples posts so it's great to have it confirmed. I guess we could export the data to an intermediate form (csv etc.) but that's clunky and I don't like it.

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Never tried it but https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/report-server/ might get round the need for Azure etc.

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Interesting but not what I'm after I think. It looks like it still serves up the reports from a central server (albeit on-prem) which doesn't really fit in my use case. The customers for this tool are, as often as not, working on a completely disconnected laptop and they're not going to have the knowledge to start setting up power BI servers etc on it.

I need a non-server based solution and it sounds like that's just not what Power BI is. I can spend some time looking at other visualisation tools. I've heard good things about Tableaux so I might give that a try out.

Thanks for the answers guys. They were useful.

@schoemr, did you get any experience with the Embedded version? I don't think it's what I'm after but hard to say for sure as most of the tutorial resources are hiding behind a marketing firewall.

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Originally Posted by FunkyDexter

Yeah, that was pretty much what I was reading but it's always hard to be sure from reading other peoples posts so it's great to have it confirmed. I guess we could export the data to an intermediate form (csv etc.) but that's clunky and I don't like it.

Interesting but not what I'm after I think. It looks like it still serves up the reports from a central server (albeit on-prem) which doesn't really fit in my use case. The customers for this tool are, as often as not, working on a completely disconnected laptop and they're not going to have the knowledge to start setting up power BI servers etc on it.

I need a non-server based solution and it sounds like that's just not what Power BI is. I can spend some time looking at other visualisation tools. I've heard good things about Tableaux so I might give that a try out.

Thanks for the answers guys. They were useful.

@schoemr, did you get any experience with the Embedded version? I don't think it's what I'm after but hard to say for sure as most of the tutorial resources are hiding behind a marketing firewall.

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Hi Funky,

Yes I have a developer license. To build a dashboard in PowerBI is actually not hard. But there is no in-memory data engine (which is what you require) You could however obtain data in several ways:

Attachment 186972

Yeah, that's as I thought.

I think where I'm at is that it's not right for me which is a shame. Other parts of the company have been sending clients visualisations based on data that's been exported to csv/excel from the app and that works well but it's on an ad hoc/consultancy basis. It doesn't really seem to be appropriate to build it into our app.

Thanks again for the information.