09 Mar How to Set up Row-Level Security in Power BI

What is Row-Level Security in Power BI?

Row-level security in Power BI is a way to restrict the kind of data an end-user views in a Power BI report. The use of filters is usually used to limit data access at the row level and we can as well define filters within the roles. In the Power BI service, members of a particular workspace can have access to datasets in the workspace; row-level Security doesn’t restrict this data access.

Defining Roles & Rules in Power BI Desktop

The following steps will guide us on how to define roles in our Power BI Desktop;

1. Open report

 

2)From the Modeling tab, select Manage Roles.

 

3)From the Manage roles window, select Create.

 

4)Under Roles, you provide a name for the role.

5)At Tables, select the table you would like to apply a DAX rule.

6)In the Table filter DAX expression box, enter the DAX expressions, just like what we have in the picture below

After the DAX expression has been created, select the checkmark above the expression box to validate the expression.

7)Select Save

The next step is to validate our role on PowerBI Desktop by navigating to the Modelling tab and selecting view as

The View as window then appears as this whereby we can then select the checkmark for our created role and then click ok

The report for the FRANCE country then opens as shown below;

We then move to how we can validate our role on the Power BI service. We also need to know that the roles we applied to this report will definitely take effect after we have published it.

How to Validate Role on Power BI service

After we have designed our report, we then publish it to Power BI service, by selecting Publish on the Home Tab

After this report has been published, we’ll open Power BI service to check our report and then we move to manage security on our Data model. To do this, we will carefully follow the steps below;

1)In the Power BI service, select the More options menu for a dataset.

2)Select Security.

3)Under the security, it takes us to the Role-Level Security page where we can add members to the role we created in Power BI Desktop. Only the owners of the dataset will see the Security. After we have added the members by typing in the email address, we then select Add and save

We can also type in name of the user or security group when adding members but we can’t add Groups created in Power BI. Members external to your organization can be added as well.

The following groups below are usually used in setting up row-level security.

• Distribution Group

• Mail-enabled Group

• Security Group

Also Note, if the dataset is in a Group, only administrators of the group will see the security option. You can only create or modify roles within Power BI Desktop.