Two Blogs and an Open Source

by | Jul 25, 2025 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Happy Friday! We’ve just published a new blog on the BI Pixie website—check it out:

???? https://bipixie.com/blog/

BI Pixie is a groundbreaking solution for BI teams and analytics product owners to optimize Power BI adoption and trust. It goes beyond usage metrics to deliver deep insights into user behavior, satisfaction, performance bottlenecks, and security risks—empowering teams to boost engagement, prevent data leakage from misconfigured RLS, and maximize BI impact and ROI.

Going forward, I’ll continue to share learnings, best practices and open source projects here on the DataChant blog.

In today’s post, I would like to share with you my latest commits in the PowerBI-Visuals-AppSource repository on GitHub.

What is PowerBI-Visuals-AppSource?

The PowerBI-Visuals-AppSource is a repository of Power BI custom visuals that are periodically exported from Microsoft AppSource to support the Power BI community. The repository includes the pbiviz files, listing data, sample report (pbix) files, thumbnails, and automation tools that can help three personas:

  1. Power BI Administrators looking for structured data on custom visuals in order to approve them.
  2. BI Developers looking for new custom visuals or older ones that may not be found on AppSource.
  3. BI Developers without a Power BI account (e.g. between jobs), who need to download specific custom visuals to build their personal dashboards (e.g. Power BI resume).

If you find this repo useful, please give it a Star.

What’s New in PowerBI-Visuals-AppSource?

Every week I update the Visual Summary.csv file with a snapshot of all the current visuals on AppSource. The csv includes the following fields:

  • Visual name
  • Publisher
  • Short description
  • Version
  • Link to legal terms
  • Link to privacy policy
  • Link to support page
  • Release date
  • Link to AppSource page
  • Is Certified
  • Link to the pbiviz in the repo
  • GUID (Used to identify the custom visual)

Then, I run a tool to download all the visuals, sample reports and thumbnails and commit and push them to the repo. Then, I run a different tool to compare the difference between the latest and previous snapshots to share with you what’s new on AppSource. The differences in custom visuals that are detected is compiled as GitHub Announcement posts (Here).

Until yesterday, the two tools above were private, but starting from today, you can use them on your own.

DownloadVisuals.py

The DownloadVisuals.py python script uses the Visual Summary CSV file to download new versions of visuals that are not located in the repo. Then, it downloads their sample reports and thumbnails, and move visuals to their corresponding folders based on their new status: Newly-certified visuals move to the certified folder. Previously-certified visuals that are no longer certified move to the Uncertified folder. Visuals that are no longer available on AppSource, move to Unlisted folder.

When the script runs, it updates a new folder: Extracted. This folder is designed to support organizations in their approval process of custom visuals. It includes unpacked content from each .pbiviz file, organized into subfolders named by the visual’s GUID and version number.

Each visual’s subfolder contains:

  • cleaned.json: Visual metadata with embedded JavaScript and CSS removed for easier review in JSON editors.
  • internal.js: The main JavaScript file. Use this to scan for potential vulnerabilities or risky behaviors.
  • package.json: Original package metadata from the visual.
  • visual.css: CSS styles extracted from the original .pbiviz.
  • externalJS.txt (optional): A list of external JavaScript libraries referenced by the visual (as found in internal.js).

We hope this structure makes it easier for your team to audit and approve third-party visuals safely.

???? Check out the folder here: Extracted

How to run the script

  1. In VS Code, clone the GitHub repo using this link: https://github.com/DataChant/PowerBI-Visuals-AppSource.git
  2. If this is not your first time using the repo in VS Code, make sure you pull latest changes
  3. In VS Code, open DownloadVisual.py file and run it

SummarizeDiff.py

The SummarizeDiff.py script compares two snapshots of the custom visuals on AppSource, and generates a summary of the changes between the two snapshots. The output is stored in the root folder as visual_summary_diff.md (See example here).

How to run the script

  1. If this is the first time running using PowerBI-Visuals-AppSource, make sure you already performed steps 1-2 in the previous section.
  2. In SummarizeChangesCustomVisuals.py, you can select the snapshots to compare. To do it, enter the desired dates in:
    • LATEST_COMMIT_DATE
    • PREVIOUS_COMMIT_DATE
  3. Run or debug the file.
  4. The differences between the two snapshots are described in visual_summary_diff.md in the main folder.
  5. Right click on visual_summary_diff.md, and select Open Preview in VS Code to view the changes between commits.

Conclusions

I hope you find the PowerBI-Visuals-AppSource repository useful. Give it a Star if you do. If you have interesting use-cases or business needs for this repository, please contact me and share how you use or want to use it.

What’s Next?

In the last article, I shared recent learnings in Fabric RTI. I plan to continue sharing new learnings as I move along and expand the Real-Time use cases in BI Pixie. Next release of BI Pixie will include real-time detection of RLS flaws and data leaks (Compared to the current version that detects data leakages during the scheduled refresh of BI Pixie’s semantic model).

Additionally, in the near future, I plan to share new articles and open source of Power Query integration with Trello and Stripe APIs. Have a great weekend!

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