UrBizEdge Blog: Setting Up Power BI Embedded on Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017

We got a request from a big company to show them how to integrate Power BI with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017.

In other to prepare demo content for the training, I had to install Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 and set it up with Power BI. NAV 2017 can integrate with Power BI via four doors -- Power BI Embedded, Power BI service NAV content pack, Power BI Desktop OData and SQL connection to the NAV database. The Power BI Embedded one is more of you bringing in your Power BI dashboard (any one, not necessarily one built from NAV datasets) into NAV reports.

I made sure to take a lot of screenshots along the way. I know this won't be interesting to a lot of us, but for the few who some day will stumble on this when they are stuck getting to make all the frustratingly many moving parts work in sync, this can be a time/life saver.

First, what is Power BI Embedded?

It is when you make your Power BI reports show in another application. Like I did to make my stock analysis dashboard show up on my Nigerian Elite web app. So I embedded it there. And the new NAV 2017 also comes with that ability for you to embed your Power BI dashboards in its reports page.

So below are the visual steps to setting Power BI embedded up in NAV 2017.

In the beginning, there was no Power BI Reports, just a link to setting it up.

Then I followed the setup instructions.

At this stage, I had to go to Microsoft Azure on the account that is the O365 administrator and has Power BI pro enabled. Under Azure Active Directory, I created a new App Registration.

Copied the sign-on URL from the NAV reply URL (in the setup dialog box). Ignore the 8080 showing up in mine, it was the result of following a wrong instruction online, I had to verbatim copy the Reply URL value here before I could get it to work.