Power Automate and Power BI Rest API

The Power BI rest api provides the ability to create a workspace. Power Automate includes an action to make a HTTP call, i.e. a rest api. So we should be able to get a flow to create a workspace. So that was my goal. Writing the first flow and getting it to work involved so many little steps I had to write blog posts so I would remember the steps.

Power BI Rest API Documentation

The documentation refers to workspaces as groups and can be found at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/groups/create-group. It states that the API can be called by a service principal profile and the required scope is Workspace.ReadWrite.All.

Other Settings

You also need to make some changes to Power BI tenant settings as well and I’d recommend creating a security group and using Azure Key Vault to store the credentials. That would make a very long blog post so I’m breaking it down into separate posts.

• Create a Power BI Service Principal Profile
• Create Key Vault to store Tenant ID, Client ID and Secret
• Write a flow to fetch the Key Vault Values
• Create a Security Group
• Update Power BI Settings
• Write a flow to create the workspace
• Extras for the workspace

Note This is a work in progress. I will be adding posts in the next few weeks – nag me if nothing is added!

Final Power Automate Flow

The final flow fetches the Service Principal credentials using a child flow, then uses HTTP action to create the workspace and finally another HTTP action to change the permissions.

Next Steps

Now we understand setting up a Service Principal and using it in a HTTP action we can look at other possibilities with the rest api and at other places we could use the rest api such at documenting what workspaces exist in a tenancy. These posts will follow.

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