Explore developer mode for Power BI datasets, reports

Important

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Enabled for Public preview General availability
Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically Jun 14, 2023 -

Business value

Enable multi-developer collaboration scenarios where development teams can work on the same codebase. Accelerate release velocity, quality, reliability, and repeatability. Enable application lifecycle management for automated deployment across development, test, and production environments.

Feature details

Developer centric experiences

Enterprise customers who manage BI environments, ISVs, and developer partners need a developer-centric workflow for Power BI datasets and reports.

Storing dataset and report metadata in a documented, source-control friendly format will enable capabilities, such as the following:

  • Source control: Power BI artifact definitions can be stored in a source control system, typically git. Source control systems allow developers to track version history, compare different revisions (diff), and revert to previous versions. Source control systems also offer developers familiar collaboration mechanisms for resolving conflicting changes (merge), and reviewing changes (pull requests).
  • Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): Customers can setup systems where developers submit a proposed change to the CI/CD system, and the system subjects the change to a series of quality gates before applying the change to the production system. The quality gates may include things like reviews by other developers (code review) and automated testing, and automated build to validate the integrity of the changes. CI/CD systems are typically built on top of source control systems.
  • Programmatic generation and editing of artifact definitions: Customers can write scripts or applications to make changes to the definition of various artifacts. These applications may be based on public documentation of the artifact definitions and/or libraries provided by Microsoft.
  • Text editor support: Like any source code files, the artifact definition files for reports and datasets must be text files, often in JSON format so that BI developers can modify these files by using any available developer tool, including VSCode and Notepad.

See also

Power BI Desktop projects (docs)