Starability
How to build and Active BI solution in Power BI using the Paradigm BI Starability custom visual. You can see this in a video on YouTube Starability - An Active BI Story
Active Business Intelligence requires three key components a user interface, a process, and a data store, and should integrate with your business processes.
In our example, there are three main components, Power BI with an active BI visualization
Power Automate to process requests. And the SQL database for data source and updating.
Power BI
Here Power BI is using the Paradigm BI Starability visual. It works in the Desktop and the Power BI service
It is available as a download and is Open Source and has configurable data and destination
These are the Starability Vital Components:
This means that you can just download and install this visual or if you wish to customise the visual, feel free. These are some different stars available from the Lunar Logic repository. The repositories all contain a Readme.md file with further information about the contents. There's a zipped up Flow in the GitHub repository which is fairly simple to install into Flow to give you the framework to create your own Active BI solution.
Power Automate
The Custom Visual uses HTTP to initiate a Power Automate flow, a JSON Payload in this form is received:
{ id: entityid, value : val ,userName : userName }
Value is the rating from 1 to 5. Value 0. no selection. is not a good option for Likert scales and is not transmitted
A confirm response is returned to the Visual it displays 'Rating received'
A row is inserted into the SQL database
Starability Demonstration Database
This demonstration uses two database tables
‘broncos2020’ is the reference table for the team, it is imported into the PowerBI and will be refreshed on a schedule
‘BroncosVotes’ is the target table for ratings, it is a direct query, which means it will Visuals attached to the data get refreshed on a lazy basis when the screen is updated. This works better in the service. it's not instant, but it does happen.
We retrieve a player rating for the ‘Stars’ visual using the Average of BrocosVotes[Vote]
This is the Brisbane Broncos Power BI report open on the desktop.
These are the main components :
- the simple table with the player names in it.
- There's an image there.
- This is the rating here.
- A little credit box using the ParaHtml Custom Visual.
- This is the actual Active BI bit where you make your selection, and it'll send the rating off to be processed.
Let's have a little look at what's happening inside the Starability Visual, not the Fields tab there's the User Name and the Id of the Player
That Id is important to enable the select to work correctly when the player is selected in the table, and also to provide a key for the database insert
In the format tab, there's the URL it actually sends the rating to, this is the Flow
The Visual is simple to configure, there a zipped up Flow in the GitHub repository which is fairly simple to install into Flow to give you the framework to create your own Active BI solution. Have a look at the video on YouTube Starability - An Active BI Story and don't forget to get in touch if you have any questions.