Drillthrough Navigation Between Power BI and SSRS Paginated Reports

Report navigation is, in my opinion, the essence of true data exploration and discovery. It lets business users see and understand important information in different forms; in summary and in detail, within context.  SSRS and Power BI are truly a dynamic duo for reporting and data discovery. I wanted to post a follow up to these two articles because they are apparently very popular topics. Posted two days apart on my blog, they received 2,744 and 3,356 views. Woo!

Nine years ago we released the Reporting Services Recipes Book from Wrox Press, which was a very popular collection of design patterns and techniques, often referenced frequently by Microsoft leaders at industry conferences. In the book, we showcased different ways to move between SSRS reports by passing parameters and dynamic URLs to create interactive reporting solutions. I am working with my former co-author and a team of talented BI and report design experts on the second edition of the the Recipe book that will include not only updated examples of SSRS patterns for on-prem report solutions but we are including new patterns for Power BI Report Server and Paginated reports in the Power BI service.

Today we have Power BI in addition to SSRS (now called “Paginated Reports”). These tools are different and often serve distinctly different purposes for creating reporting solutions. But, using Power BI and SSRS/Paginated Reports together opens doors to create incredibly rich integrated report and data discovery solutions.

I recently published two blog posts to share some of my work-in-progress for the recipe book: Drillthrough from Power BI to an SSRS Paginated Report, and: Drillthrough from Paginated Report to Power BI. Both of these posts demonstrate navigation from one of the report tools to the other, essentially allowing users to work with these two capable tools in a full circle.  As the newer and more modern data analysis tool, Power BI fills and important gap but it is not a replacement for the type of multi-page grouped and repeated style of reporting that SSRS is optimized for. Likewise, Power BI excels as an interactive tool for data discovery and self-service analysis. SSRS and Power BI were borne from the same platform and and have common architectures but also many differences. Used together, the realm of possibilities is expansive.

It is important to understand that the techniques used to navigate and pass filter context between these report tools is limited to the capabilities of web query string parameterization. In my experience, this is rarely a show-stopper but I do occasionally encounter folks pushing the limits – both practically and technically.

Both SSRS and Power BI have their own drillthrough capabilities using internal mechanisms that do not rely on the web browser and report server to handle web URLs. However, moving between different report types relies and web URLS. Although powerful and flexible, there are some limitations. Each web browser has it’s own maximum URL length limit, ranging from 2048 to 2083 or so characters. The server-hosted web services also have their own limits. For simplicity, let’s call the limit about 2000 characters, which will include the base domain and folder path URL, and the query string directives, parameters and values.  Keep all this within the ~2000 character limit and you’re good.  Also be mindful that all this is visible in the browser’s address bar. Requests and responses sent to the Power BI service are encrypted so there is little risk of exposure outside the session. Your on-prem report server connections can also be protected using certificate-based encryption.  Just be mindful about what you pass in sight of the user and web browser after the stream is decrypted on the client.

The report navigation recipes posted here on my blog are early drafts. I welcome your feedback, questions and ideas for more report recipes. Sample files and other downloadable content that are referenced in the recipes will be available when the book is published – and no, that date has not been set, but I will make an announcement when we know.  Thank you in advanced for your questions and comments.