Hey folks, @Aleisha_M has been making great progress with the Speckle Viewer for PowerBI, and we’re in the polishing phase of the exercise.
It’d be great if custom views from Speckle (below):
Showed up in Power BI and were able to be set as the default view of the model when people navigate to the page - currently they seem to be hardcoded:
@Aleisha_M and @chris.welch , are you using canonical views in the main app? We are looking hard at their uses there, embedded viewer and BI visual has been considered too.
We had a partial support for the standard views being a visual configuration, do you think it should stay as that or like main app be be a viewer Ui option? Both?
Same goes for display styles, orthogonal view, section box etc. we’re considering clutter vs utility in embedded cases.
The main thing for us is using the viewer to make a first good impression when a client is looking at the model - even more important with the PowerBI viewer. With linear infrastructure the standard zoomed out perspective home view doesn’t really sell it.
Two use cases for us -
1- large linear infrastructure models - e.g. stormwater network or a road. Sometimes when they are zoomed out to their home view (zoomed to the bounding box I assume?) you can’t actually see the geometry as it is spread out and small.
2 - smaller models within large infrastructure models - e.g. a specific bridge with a contextual road corridor. In this case it would be really useful to choose a ‘home’ view which is zoomed in to the bridge and not the road.
In both cases the ability to set a specific named view / camera would solve these issues. The cases above are especially noticeable in PowerBI where you start with a tiny window to view the model to begin with.
So a saved view(s) defined in Speckle app as opposed to defined in and published from host applications?
Both would be good - Navis for example will have saved views that people will be familiar with and may want to return to, but saving a view in Speckle itself and having that bubble up in PowerBI would definitely be easier.
Also, having views per project vs. model vs. version is an interesting problem as for a federated model you definitely want views at the project level, but individual users may want them at the model level for showing changes between versions for example.
Maybe being able to click view defined in a version and elevating it to the project level so it can be used elsewhere? idk.
The scenario we can mock up is the state of comments right now.
You comment on an object and that is clearly a model version bound element. That comment has a saved view which recalls all the federation state.
We are actively looking at saved views and slideshows as we used to have in legacy frontend (when we used to hack views in the url) nominally we considered this for main viewer and secondarily embedded viewer.
PowerBI visual is more-or-less like the embedded viewer …
All seems legit to me - I’ll pass on the message.
Good point to make these available in PowerBI. And as Jonathon says we’re looking to completely redo this feature this year. You’ll be able to save views directly from the Speckle viewer in addition to sending named views from host apps. And good idea to also make it possible to set one of the views as the default view on load – I’ve added this to the spec. This is all a top request so it will be prioritized soon.