Dashboards as Cards in ACC / BIM360 (Bimbeats / Kibana or Power BI)

Wondering if other firms have started to setup dashboards for use as cards in ACC or BIM360. We would like to put some data viz in each of our project’s ACC Insights module. I have struggled with nginx before and am not quite interested in revisiting that effort. We have dabbled with Power BI, yet have not integrated that with Bimbeats in any functional manner.

Konrad had shared this link:
https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/How-to-integrate-Power-BI-with-BIM-360.html

Has anyone used this process? Any way around everyone in Revit needing a Power BI Pro account? At one time I thought only the developer and publisher of the dashboard required the pro account.

Thank you,
-Ren

@Ren I had a chance to talk about this to a fellow Bimbeats user, and they promised to reply to your question here. Thank you for your patience.

Hi Ren,

We have published the Power BI dashboard in BIM 360 Insights. I will assume you want to publish a dashboard with an auto-refresh function and anomalous access. In this case, the link you saw is not enough to make this happen.

Here is how we make it work.

  1. Pull data from Elastic to Power BI using a direct API call. (The scroll method doesn’t work because Power BI auto-refresh doesn’t support dynamic API calls). Without the scroll method, you still have the 100000 limit in each API call. Now you have to select the data field you need and add them to the query or do some aggregation to reduce the size of the response. It’s also a good practice to make your data set nice and clean. You can check this link :
    Search API | Elasticsearch Guide [8.9] | Elastic
  2. Do the visualization. In our case, we move most of the calculation/measure into the elastic query. So we don’t need to make too much effort to create the visualization. Also, elastic has a much much higher performance to do large calculation/measure.
  3. Publish the dashboard to your workspace. You will need one license to do this.
  4. Set up the auto-refresh. Go to the data set of your dashboard on your workspace website. Then you can follow this page.
    Publishing Power BI to web and configure schedule refresh | Medium
  5. Export to HTML. Power bi will create an iframe tag for you. Copy it, and you will need it in BIM 360.
  6. Add to BIM 360 Insights. Go to Insights and add a new card. Use the HTML type and paste the iframe you get from Power BI. Save it, and all set.

Hope this help.
Chenzhang

3 Likes

Chenzhang,

Thank you for the response, we will dig in and try this out.

-Ren