Navigation between reports is the hallmark of an interactive reporting solution, enabling the ability to drill-through and see relevant details and contextual filtered information in a target report. Power BI and Paginated Reports both offer navigation capabilities suited for different purposes. Having the ability to navigate between reports can provide a tremendous amount of power and flexibility.
This is simple math: with two different report types, there are four different possible report navigation combinations. They are:
- Power BI report to Power BI report
- Power BI report to Paginated report
- Paginated report to Power BI report
- Paginated report to paginated report
Continuing this series of blog posts to highlight our recently published eBook about Paginated Report recipes, this post summarizes the technique detailed in recipe #4, “Drill-through from Power BI to Paginated Report On-premises”.
If you have worked with the native SSRS report drill-through using report actions, that capability is not yet baked into the product. It probably will be some day but likely not soon. That’s OK because this technique, using URL navigation, works quite well. There is one other twist which is that the URL parameters are a little different when comparing on-premises Paginated (SSRS) reports to Paginated reports in the Power BI service. The technique in in this recipe uses an on-prem target report. You can apply the same pattern in the cloud with sight modifications and I will post an example in the near future.
This image depicts the source Power BI report with links that navigate to the target paginated report, showing filtered details:
The mechanism to enable navigation is a report URL produced with a DAX measure. The code emits a URL with parameters that preserve the row and filter context of the selected item or record. This URL measure is exposed as a link in a table or matrix visual in the Power BI report, optional with a URL “link” icon:
To see the instructions in detail, follow this link to the recipe: 04-Drill-through from Power BI to Paginated Report On-premises | Paul Turley’s SQL Server BI Blog