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

[FunkyDexter]

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.