Assigning a workspace to a Power BI Application lifecycle management (ALM) deployment pipeline

APPLIES TO: Power BI Desktop Power BI service

Deployment pipelines enable you to assign and unassign workspaces to any stage in a pipeline. This capability is particularly important for organizations that already have workspaces that are used as development, test, and production environments. In such cases, you can assign each workspace to its corresponding pipeline stage, and continue working in your usual flow.

Note

This article describes how to assign and unassign a workspace to a deployment pipeline stage in the Power BI service. You can also perform these functions programmatically, using the Assign Workspace and Unassign Workspace Power BI REST APIs.

Assign a workspace to any vacant pipeline stage

To assign a workspace to a pipeline, the pipeline stage you want to assign the workspace to has to be vacant. If you want to assign a workspace to a pipeline stage that already has another workspace assigned to it, unassign the current workspace from that stage and then continue with assigning the new workspace.

Before you assign a workspace to a pipeline stage, review the limitations section and make sure that the workspace meets the required conditions.

Note

Before you assign or unassign a workspace to a pipeline, consider that every time you deploy to a vacant stage, a new workspace is created.

To assign a workspace to a pipeline stage, follow these steps:

  1. Open the pipeline.

    A screenshot showing a deployment pipelines new workspace with all the pipeline stages unassigned.

  2. In the stage you want to assign a workspace to, expand the dropdown titled Choose a workspace to assign to this pipeline.

  3. From the dropdown menu, select the workspace you want to assign to this stage.

    A screenshot showing the assign workspace dropdown in a deployment pipelines empty stage.

  4. Select Assign a workspace.

    A screenshot showing the assign workspace button in a deployment pipelines empty stage.

Unassign a workspace from a pipeline stage

You can unassign a workspace from any pipeline stage. If you want to assign a different workspace to a pipeline stage, you first have to unassign the current workspace from that stage.

To unassign a workspace from a pipeline stage, follow these steps:

  1. Open the pipeline.

  2. In the stage you want to unassign the workspace from, select settings.

  3. From the settings menu, select Unassign workspace.

    A screenshot showing the unassign workspace option in deployment pipelines, available from the settings menu of the pipeline stage.

  4. In the Unassign workspace dialogue box, select Unassign.

    A screenshot showing the unassign workspace pop-up window in deployment pipelines, with the unassign button highlighted.

Item connections

After assigning a workspace to a deployment pipeline stage, if there are any adjacent stages already assigned, deployment pipelines attempts to create the connections between the Power BI items (such as reports, dashboards and datasets) in the adjacent stages. During this process, deployment pipelines checks the names of the Power BI items in the source stage and the stages adjacent to it. Connections to items in adjacent stages, are established according to the item's type and name. If there are multiple items of the same type with the same name in the adjacent stages, assigning the workspace will fail. To understand why this happens and resolve such cases, see Why am I getting the 'can't assign the workspace' error message when I assign a workspace?

Connections between items are only established when you assign a workspace to a pipeline stage. Adding a new item to a workspace that's part of a pipeline, doesn't trigger the creation of connections between that item and identical items in adjacent stages. To trigger forming a connection between a newly added item in a workspace stage and its equivalent item in an adjacent stage, unassign and reassign the workspace that contains the newly added item.

Limitations

Next steps