Embed Power BI image inside Flow email action

[2makeitwork]

Hi,

Not sure if this question fits in Flow or Power BI (PBI) forum. I've created an alert in PBI that can be used in Flow. The action of the trigger is to send an email from Outlook to a group to tell them the PBI report is updated. The data refresh in PBI occurs automatically everyday. 

Question: instead of just including a hyperlink in the Flow Outlook email body, is there a way to embed a picture of the PBI report similar to the subscribe function in PBI where an image of the report is included in the body and attachment of the email subscription notification? If not, are there other ways to achieve this?

Thanks

[v-alzhan-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @2makeitwork ,

Sorry for the requirement couldn't be achieved in Microsoft flow currently since the function to embed power Bi image in flow email that you mentioned is not supported in Microsoft flow currently.

Best Regards,

Alice

Community Support Team _ Alice Zhang
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Anonymous]

Hi @2makeitwork ,

Sorry this is late but it might help someone else.   I followed the example in this youtube video: How to Send Email with Image using Power Automate - YouTube.  He copies the file content into an "Initialize Variable" step and the uses the variable in the email body.  He uses a Sharepoint file as the input but I substituted "Get file content using Path" step with "Export To File for Power BI Reports" and it worked perfectly.

1. Create an "Export To File for Power BI Reports" step and set Export Format to PNG

2. Create an "Initialize Variable" step - set Type to "String" and Value to:

<img src="data&colon;image/png;base64,@{body('Export_To_File_for_Power_BI_Reports')['body']['$content']}"/><br>

3. Create a "Send to email (V2)" step and put the Variable in the body:

@{variables('ImageTag')}

Kind Regards,

Sean

[julienvdc]

Hey @Anonymous 

I am interested in what you did 🙂

I know it's been a while since you shared your solution, but do you happen to still have the setup in place? Could you perhaps share a screenshot of it?

Best,

Julien

[_DB_]

@julienvdc @Anonymous 

I got this to work after 2 hours of trial and error. The one elusive modification for Power BI is the need to specify the image format. This was glossed over by @Anonymous and wasn't in any tutorial I could find anywhere.

You need to add the following JSON to the "FormatSettings" box in the Power BI export connector for Power Automate:

{"OutputFormat": "PNG"}

I found the JSON specification here: 

Export Power BI embedded analytics paginated reports API - Power BI | Microsoft Docs 

Also, the instructions from @Anonymous show a slightly inaccurate code snippet for setting the variable value because this forum mangles the colon in the snippet. SO PLEASE REPLACE THE TEXT "[COLON]" BELOW WITH AN ACTUAL ":"

<img src="data[COLON]image/png;base64,@{outputs('Export_Report_1')?['body'].$content}"/>

 ... where "Export_Report_1" is the name of your Power BI export step.

This is the actual snippet you'll need if you are following the instructions in the YouTube video:

<img src="data[COLON]image/png;base64,"/>

Just put your expression (that the video shows you how to create) right before the rightmost double quote.

[julienvdc]

Hey @_DB_ thanks for the info! Really appreciate it! I'll have a look at it!

[julienvdc]

Hey @_DB_ seem like you're using a paginated report, correct?

I have a non-paginated report and the config is thus slightly different (looks like what @Anonymous was working with)... I am still struggling to this image export inserted within the body of the email... Any experience with non-paginated reports?

[julienvdc]

Hey everyone!

In the end I managed to get to what I wanted!

I did a mix of what you guys have said and what was described here: https://spknowledge.com/2021/04/28/power-automate-send-email-with-embeded-image/

[RicardoA]

This question showed up as one of the top results in Google and I decided to add an answer for those that may see this question later.

I have created a flow that activates on the Subscription email.

The flow is a simple email trigger, I setup the Power BI subscription to only be sent to me:

After the email arrives I initialize a String Variable and set the HTML Body to it, I then convert the HTML of the body to Text and save the Second URL to a Compose.
(This HTML step can be skipped, I am doing it to retrieve the Power BI Report Link/URL so I can include it in my Custom Email.)

The next step is to grab the Power BI Image that is included in the Subscription Email. As we know, the subscription email has a very small image and in most cases useless.

For this I initialize a second String Variable to store the Image ID:

Now we loop the attachments, the Subscription contains 1 attachment when you see it in outlook but in reality the system sees two attachments, the image attached to the email and the image in the body of the email. We are interested in the Image in the body, the other attachment is not usable.

We use a condition/If then statement to check if the attachment "Is Inline" which means its part of the email body.

And if so (if yes) we create get the Image ID and create the Email to be forwarded with a full size image and the Power BI Link:

The three very important pieces of code in the email body are to get todays Date, the URL for the Power BI Report, and the HTML Code to display the image:

You could add additional HTML Code, such as your Signature and other details.

[LW2016]

Thank you!  This is exactly what I needed!