Hi Speckle community!
I’m fairly new to Speckle and have been practicing linking revit models through Speckle to PowerBi.
I have recently set up a local development server but have found that my models won’t display in Power Bi, the data is linking and I can use other graphics in the dashboard just not the Speckle 3D viewer.
Is it possible to work with a local server and Power Bi in this way?
Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks
Apologies @nadixon my radar had flagged this as answered but plainly not.
If you can access the frontend of your local server from another machine, and, say, use the embedded viewer, then there is no reason we know why the 3d visual would not be working.
I’d ask you to double check that the project you are seeking to dashboard is set as “link shared” in the access settings.
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for your reply. The 3D display in the local server is working. If I use the URL link in power Bi the data columns are all there and I can visualise the models data using default power bi visuals. It’s only the Speckle 3D viewer that is not working. When I add the fields there is no loading bar and it jumps to a white display…
Could it be that the 3D viewer isn’t compatible with the local server? Or maybe a browser setting?
Any help is much appreciated.
Many thanks,
Neil
while you are sharing, please share the fields you have completed in the visual configuration
Undetermined - we haven’t tested for this - many edge case issues are restrictions in the powerbi security sandbox.
Hi Jonathon,
Please see the images below from Power Bi, the url and fields:
I have also filtered the speckle_type by rooms:
But still not visual of the model…
it may be - or perhaps because it is not a TLS certificated server endpoint http
Hi Jonathon,
I have been working with Neil to figure out what is happening. We have made sure we’re upgraded to 2.22.1, which is running on a locally hosted machine in the office. We have then tried to import the standard RAC_basic_sample_project from Revit 2023 and set it to Link Shareable within Speckle.
We can then use the Power BI Speckle Viewer (powerbiSpeckleVisual-2.19.0.pbiviz from Github). This allows us to get the data from the project, using the model URL: http:///projects/2049490817/models/5ffe904cfa
We then get the requisite fields in the query and can add them to the visualisation fields as expected. However, once the three required fields are completed we get a blank visualisation window.
The Visualisation Filters show that there is the expected data, so I am unsure what else we can do. I see you mention TLS certificated endpoint, but as its internal on HTTP as per the docker container environment and the data is being parsed with what I can only assume to be valid values in the query results - There are rows, and there are MANY. I am a little stuck on understanding what else we can do to investigate what is going on and why the visualisation isn’t appearing.
Any further help you can offer would be appreciated, if you could please let me know if there are any useful logs that may provide more information to help resolve this.
I appreciate all you’ve tried and reported back here. My speculation around http vs https is not on whether it IS or IS NOT a security risk in your circumstances but whether PowerBi is restricting the outbound query. As I say it’s just a hunch.
One of the blockers to the full usefulness and certification of the model viewer is that the spec from Microsoft is not anticipating any outbound queries from a visual but only data connectors. Hence the hunch. It’s the same reason why we don’t collect logs or telemetry from the viewer visual.
I’m joining the party late. @AdrianForrester @nadixon, I cannot access the models using the URLs from the screenshots. I believe this is where the problem lies.
Hi gokermu,
This is because the server is locally hosted on our LAN/Intranet; it’s not exposed to the Internet. This also means we can’t wrap it with a Let’s Encrypt cert as the container solution offers. As Jonathon has suggested, the TLS issue is a likely culprit, I’d not picked up on the fact that Power BI would need certs for LAN traffic. We aren’t aiming to make this available externally, so we’re looking into how we can fudge the certificates so it might work on our LAN.
Many thanks
Adrian
Until we implement offline support for 3D Viewer Visual, I guess it is what it is. I’ll let you know when we have an update on this.
Thanks gokermu,
We got there eventually 
Ok thanks Jonathan,
I was unsure if it was a solution but can conclude that the 3D visualiser for power bi will only work with data connected through an online or internet based server. Please correct me if I have misunderstood
We have attempted to create Power Bi 3D visualisations using a local server but this is not possible due to the programming of the pbviz file.
Is the fix as simple as tweaking a line of code on the pbviz file?
I would like to add that I have also experimented with the Autodesk data connectors and prefer the Speckle version by far. The Speckle version is much more straight forward with seemingly greater capabilities.
Many thanks,
Neil
