How to add/ remove the columns linked between Power BI and Power Apps?

In my last blog post “Integrate Powerapps in Power BI report to achieve write-back ability“, we learned how to integrate Power Apps with Power BI by linking columns to achieve write-back functionality. Now say you have linked 2 columns from Power BI to Power Apps visual and then created the App in Power Apps portal. You have published your Power BI report with Power Apps integrated into it. The users liked it but now they have requested to add 2 more columns to be linked between Power BI and Power Apps. In this blog post, I will show steps on how to achieve this change requirement. This change can’t be achieved from Power BI Desktop, you can implement this change only from Power BI web service.

1. Go to Power BI Web Service

Login into Power BI web service and open the report with Power Apps integrated into it. Click Edit to make the report editable. The report with Power Apps integrated should look something like below.

After clicking on edit, add the additional two columns requested by users in the “PowerApps Data”. In this use case, I am adding “Customer” and “Executive” name columns. Please note that I have renamed the original column name from “Name” to “Customer” and “Executive”.

Click on PowerApps ellipsis. It should show option to edit your App. Click on “Edit” and now you will be taken to Power Apps Portal to edit Power Apps.

2. Power Apps portal

Once you are in Power Apps portal, in the tree view of your App click on the main linked Gallery. In Power Fx section you can see “PowerBIIntegration.Data”, just add a dot to test and see the new columns added from Power BI – PowerApps Data. In this use case, I have added “Customer” and “Executive” name in the PowerApps Data. Both the columns are now part of linked columns in PowerBIIntegration.

Now you can add dropdown for newly added columns in the App.

That’s it on Power Apps side, now just save and publish the App. The Power BI report should interact with Power App on all 4 columns (including 2 new ones). You will need to add extra columns in SQL Table if you want to record the 2 new filter columns. If you want to remove any column then you need to follow the same steps as above, just that you need to remove columns from PowerApps Data in Power BI web service instead of adding any columns.

Conclusion

Integrating PowerApps into Power BI is really a step above to provide more functionalities and better user experience. As users get their hands on such functionalities, they will want to use more and there come more changes. Summarizing above steps

• Open Power BI report in web service and click “Edit”.
• Select your existing PowerApp visual
• Add the new columns in “PowerApps Data” by checking the new column check boxes.
• On PowerApp’s Visual and click on ellipsis in the top right, and click Edit.
• This will launch PowerApp studio page so you can edit the app.