Embed a RDL in your Power BI Report

An RDL is a report that specializes in pages instead of a full screen dashboard. Dashboarding in Power BI focusses on giving insights in you business through an interactive graphical representation. Sometimes you just want to print out the numbers, with page numbers and a nice header. For this format Paginated Reports (RDL) are available. Webdashboard supports RDL as a separate report, but also embedded inside a Power BI report. The great thing about embedded RDL’s inside a Power BI report is that you can reuse the filters from your report on your RDL’s. This why you can create beautifully formatted printouts of data underlaying your dashboards.

How does this work

In Power BI you have a visual that can reference a RDL report. You just select one that is available inside your Power BI Workspace. 

If you don’t know how to create a paginated report, follow this tutorial:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/paginated-reports/paginated-reports-quickstart-aw

To connect parameters to Power BI filters follow this tutorial.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/paginated-report-visual

Why doesn’t it work in Webdashboard

If you now connect the Power BI report in Webdashboard, you might see an error. It will only work if the Power BI Report is connected to the same Semantic Model (Dataset). Otherwise you’ll see that your RDL visual will give an exception. 

Microsoft doesn’t give us a way (yet) to find out what Semantic model (dataset) the embedded RDL is connected to. So to fix this click the dataset button (screenshot above). Then check the dataset that is connected to the RDL (screenshot below).