Drill-through from Power BI to Paginated Report – Report Recipe #4

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

Paul Turley

Paul Turley

Microsoft Data Platform MVP, Principal Consultant for 3Cloud Solutions Specializing in Business Intelligence, SQL Server solutions, Power BI, Analysis Services & Reporting Services.

3 thoughts on “Drill-through from Power BI to Paginated Report – Report Recipe #4

  1. Hello Paul,

    Is there a way that we can apply similar drill-through technique to navigate from summary page to specific detailed page within the report in pbirs? The URLs are looking same for all the pages in report server and which is not the case in service version

    1. Hi Santosh
      The technique in Power BI Report Server should be exactly the same as an on-prem report server. PBRS is SSRS with the added capability to host PBIX reports and the commands should be the same. I would expect the examples in this recipe to work for Power BI Report Server.
      If you are finding otherwise, please provide an example to demonstrate the problem.

      The technique is slightly different for Paginated reports hosted in the Power BI service though. In that case, the syntax for passing report parameters looks like this:
      https://app.powerbi.com/groups//rdlreports/?rp:Parameter1Name=Value1&Parameter2Name=Value2

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