Last week I shared a post highlighting a common pattern for making API data available through dataflows in Power BI, and included a few diagrams to show how a customer was implementing this pattern.

In the post I mentioned that I was simplifying things a bunch to only focus on the core pattern. One of the things I didn’t mention is that the diagrams I shared were just one piece of the puzzle. Another part was the need to define dataflows in one workspace, and then use those as a template for creating other dataflows in bulk.

This is simple enough to do via the Power BI portal for an individual dataflow, but if you need to do it for every dataflow in a workspace, you might need a little more power – PowerShell, to be specific.

The rest of this post is not from me – it’s from the dataflows engineering team. it describes a set of PowerShell scripts they’ve published on GitHub, and which address this specific problem. The rest is pretty self-explanatory, so I’ll just mention that these are unsupported scripts presented as-is, and I’ll let the rest speak for itself.

Microsoft Power BI dataflows samples

The document below describes the various PowerShell scripts available for Power BI dataflows. These rely on the Power BI public REST APIs and the Power BI PowerShell modules.

Power BI Dataflow PowerShell scripts

Below is a table of the various Power BI PowerShell modules found in this repository.

Description	Module Name	Download
Export all dataflows from a workspace	ExportWorkspace.ps1	GitHub Location
Imports all dataflows into a workspace	ImportWorkspace.ps1	GitHub Location
Imports a single dataflow	ImportModel.ps1	GitHub Location

For more information on Powershell support for Power BI, please visit powerbi-powershell on GitHub

Supported environments and PowerShell versions

• Windows PowerShell v3.0 and up with .NET 4.7.1 or above.
• PowerShell Core (v6) and up on any OS platform supported by PowerShell Core.

Installation

1. The scripts depend on the MicrosoftPowerBIMgmt module which can be installed as follows:

Install-Module -Name MicrosoftPowerBIMgmt

If you have an earlier version, you can update to the latest version by running:

Update-Module -Name MicrosoftPowerBIMgmt

1. Download all the scripts from the GitHub Location into a local folder.
2. Unblock the script by right click on the files and select “Unblock” after you download. Otherwise you might get a warning when you run the script.

Uninstall

If you want to uninstall all the Power BI PowerShell cmdlets, run the following in an elevated PowerShell session:

Get-Module MicrosoftPowerBIMgmt* -ListAvailable | Uninstall-Module -Force

Usage

The APIs below supports two optional parameters:

• -Environment: A flag to indicate specific Power BI environments to log in to (Public, Germany, USGov, China, USGovHigh, USGovMil). Default is Public
• -V: A flag to indicate whether to produce verbose output. Default is false.

Export workspace

Exports all the dataflow model.json from a Power BI workspace into a folder:

.\ExportWorkspace.ps1 -Workspace "Workspace1" -Location C:\dataflows

Import workspace

Imports all the dataflow model.json from a folder into a Power BI workspace. This script also fixes the reference models to point to the right dataflow in the current workspace:

.\ImportWorkspace.ps1 -Workspace "Workspace1" -Location C:\dataflows -Overwrite

Import dataflow

Imports a dataflow model.json into a Power BI workspace:

.\ImportModel.ps1 -Workspace "Workspace1" -File C:\MyModel.json -Overwrite