Viewing as roles in the Power BI service – Deploy and maintain assets

Viewing as roles in the Power BI service

As you saw with the View as feature in Power BI Desktop, you can test roles in the Power BI service. For this, you need to hover over a role on the Row-Level Security page and select More options (the ellipsis) > Test as role. You will then see the way a report appears to the members of the role. For example, Figure 4-4 shows what members of the Plains role would see, which you created in Chapter 2, “Model the data.” The role applies a filter on Sales Territory.

FIGURE 4-4 Testing a role in the Power BI service.

If needed, you can test a combination of roles or view as a specific user by selecting Now viewing as in the blue bar at the top and selecting the desired parameters. Once you are satisfied with how the roles work, you can select Back to Row-Level Security.

Important Row-Level Security and Workspace Roles

Row-level security does not work on users who have the Contributor, Member, or Admin role in the workspace in which the dataset resides. Those who have edit rights will always see the whole dataset regardless of the security settings, even though the Test as role feature may show a filtered dataset.

We review workspace roles in Skill 4.2: Create and manage workspaces.

Provide access to datasets

The Power BI service enables collaboration between different users. To let other users build reports based on a dataset that you published, you have to share the dataset with them. There are several ways of achieving this, as described next.

Sharing through a workspace

When publishing to the Power BI service, you can publish to your own workspace or a shared workspace. Contributing users of shared workspaces will automatically have access to the dataset you publish.