PageStar Custom Visual, The Start of an Idea

Preamble (ReadMe)

PageStar is a Custom Power BI Visual from ParadigmBI
It is for rating Power BI pages the stars are from https://github.com/LunarLogic/starability
This is a demonstration module for https://paradigmbi.com.au/
This is all open-source, please feel free to play with the code and acknowledge the sources, which are varied.

This visual sends a page rating to a URL, we've been using Microsoft Flow to test this
The JSON looks like this:  { pageName: pageName, userName : userName , value : val  }
This should be self-explanatory, but feel free to ask questions. There's a flow package called TestPageStarFlow.zip in the repository root to get you started. 

There is a single field for the user name, create a text measure for this like this: UserName = USERNAME() and put the measure in the username field.

On the Format pane, enter the URL of the Flow or whatever web service you want to use, and put a page name in the page name field

The PageStar Visual

This is the first Power BI Custom visual that I created, like all of these things it inherits much its form and function from prior practice, The code for the visual is available in a GitHub repository https://github.com/MikeAinOz/pagestar. What differentiates this visual is the ability to post an action, a prime requirement of Active Business Intelligence.

The design of the stars from https://github.com/LunarLogic/starability was very important. There are five stars so that it can form a nice Likert scale and there are tooltips over the stars to help with selection. These are the tooltips, designed to inform and perhaps amuse: "Unacceptable", "Deficient", "Mediocre", "Copacetic",  "Outstanding". I thought this was more than adequate to collect how someone felt about a page. Note that I was focussing on the page, not a specific observation or insight, there is another functionality available for that via Power BI Comments and Bookmarks. The PageStar visual is intended to communicate the utility of a report to the consumers to the report author as directly as possible.

The Visual POSTs the response via https to Power Automate aka Microsoft Flow where it can be consolidated for further reporting. This visual was proof of the concept that it was possible to post messages from the PowerBI service, although the practice is discouraged. Note that the username parameter does depend on the measure and that the page name is free text, so plan accordingly.

The current version (1.0.1) is available for download at pagestar.1.0.1.pbiviz

 
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