The Postman app is useful as a developer if you want to send requests and see responses when interacting with Web APIs, as well as seeing what the calls actually do. In this post, we will look at how to call the Power BI REST API from Postman.
First, follow the instructions here to register an Azure App to use with Power BI. Note the client id and secret.
Next, install Postman for Windows and open it. Create a new Request. We will create a request to get a Bearer that we will use to authenticate with the Power BI API. The type will be POST and we will be sending the request to https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/token. We will also send the Content-Type in the Header as application/x-www-form-urlencoded:
Next, click on the Body and click on Raw, and send through the following:
grant_type=password
&username=your@email.com
&password=yourpassword
&client_id=your client id from the Azure app you create above
&client_secret=your secret from the Azure app you created above
&resource=https://analysis.windows.net/powerbi/api
Click on Send. We get the access_token returned, which we will use in our next request as the Bearer. Copy it:
Now let’s create a request to the Power BI API. Let’s get a list of Apps in Power BI. We will send through the GET request https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/apps, and in the Headers we will add an Authorization key, with the value as Bearer <your access token>:
We get the apps returned in the response:
Pretty easy!
Check out the Power BI REST API documentation if you want to play around with more features using the Postman app.
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CARL
[…] ideas in this post extend an original post from Carl de Souza. Carl shows how to obtain an OAuth2 access token but does so with hardcoded […]
Hi.. I keep on getting an invalid grant. 🙁
“error”: “invalid_grant”,
“error_description”: “AADSTS50126: Error validating credentials due to invalid username or password.
Can you help please.
Did you try giving rest api access to your application in azure?
Hey Carl
I have tried the same but in my Scope I do not get Tenant.Read.All even though I have added it and granted consent ??
ANy ideas how to combine this with multi-factor authentication? When you have MFA set this approach does not seem to work
Hi Carl.
What I really want is a automated approach to this.
Question. If we use a Service Principle, then is it really necessary to provide the
&username=your@email.com and &password=yourpassword
Especially when &password can change over time and client_id and client_secrete can be used in place of this, I beleive ?