Unable to load the 3D model in Power BI visual

Hi,
I have successfully connected the speckle stream to Power BI using connector and seeing all the data in table in PBI. I have added speckle visual in PBI as well and added stream url and object id but model is not loading in visual, am I missing something?

Thanks in advance,
Jigar

Have the same issue using Revit 2022, and nothing is showing up. have used the alpha3 & alpha4 versions and nothing. any fix?

Hi @ceboccardo and @jigar1276 !

This connector is still in very early stages of development so we appreciate your patience :slight_smile:
Most of our team is taking a break for the holidays but we will make sure to investigate in early January.

In the meantime, please have a look at the docs in case there is some misconfiguration in your dashboard: Power BI | Speckle Docs

@teocomi Fair enough just discovered Speckle recently and I am impressed with all the interoperability. Actually I am trying to test it for some of my workflows. I offer myself to help the platform to grow testing it and giving my feedback… I work in construction actually integrating 3D models and data and doing analysis in powerBI.

Thanks for your reply and great job to the entire team… looking forward to integrate speckle even more!

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@ceboccardo and @teocomi ,

It worked for me after I changed the stream URL from private to public.

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Hi @jigar1276,

sorry about the confusion about this, I’ll add a clear warning on the visual to make it clear, but in essence:

The current viewer does not allow to view data from private streams, as it doesn’t have access to the “login credentials” that were used on the “PowerBI Data Connector”.

We’re working lifting this limitation but we have no ETA for this at this moment.

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Thanks a lot @AlanRynne for the reply. Fingers cross for the future enhancements.

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You’ll definitely get some this week so stay tuned! :wink:

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Hey @jigar1276, we’ve made some dramatic updates in the last release that maybe you’d like to try out! Sadly, Private Streams are still not supported but we’re working on it for the next one!

Feel free to download them from our repos as usual :wink:

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Could you give an update on when you think private streams are supported in the Power BI Speckle viewer? I can imagine it can be a tricky issue! A few colleagues are testing Speckle in Power BI but they can’t use it yet with project data due to this limitation.

The restriction rests on how that authentication to a private stream might exist. MSoft didn’t build the visuals API anticipating external calls, so other solutions bake the geometry into the data query layer. This is also why Speckle Viewer visual is not on the MSoft marketplace.

The options for deploying authentication are up for debate/opinion/discussion. And are not particularly preferable to making a stream public and non-discoverable.

  • Embed a PAT token in the dashboard/visual config :arrow_forward: if extracted, allows the dashboard user to impersonate the token owner
  • Store that token in the stream data, in globals, for example :arrow_forward: this is even worse a security risk

The remaining option is the Data Connector side-loads the data into the viewer. This requires changes to the Viewer itself before getting to the visual. It may bring advantages as the Query already retrieves all data for each object, which could be advantageous for that reason, but not in the current viewer API.

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Thank you for the quick reply and clarification Jonathon!

To me, it sounds like this option does make the most sense. It will be in similar to how other solutions deal with it.

Without the ability to securely pull from a private Speckle stream project, we unfortunately have to discourage our project teams to use it on projects to prevent issues related to data and legal requirements because non compliance can result in very severe implications.

It is largely related to what an organisation’s distribution of PowerBI dashboards would be.

With the new Speckle viewer API, would it be possible that this change makes it to the roadmap because it would enable our project teams to use the Power BI connector on live projects? I can imagine others might have the same security needs as well.

In addition to Microsoft certification, this is something under serious consideration. That’s about it was definitive as I can be about what the roadmap is.

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