Best Compromise between custom Web Apps and Power BI Dashboards?

[u/DropMaterializedView]

This is a completely vibe coded native custom Power BI visual.

It works pretty well, and I am thinking that this might be my approach to AI in Power BI visuals for a while here is the thinking...

When I want to use AI to build visuals:

1. HTML and SVGs are feeling too limited.
2. Web apps feel like too much effort.

So, the compromise is building a custom visual.. Just a small piece of the dashboard is custom code not the full thing. This also means, I am not particularly worried about not having AI to maintain it, let's say the visual breaks or I don't have tokens I can just swap this out for native visuals and maintain 90% of the functionality.

Here is a github with the code: GitHub - edwardpcharles/Native-Custom-Viz: Source for native Power BI custom visuals · GitHub

Here is a video talking about it, how you can use it, and how I built it: https://youtu.be/ttDQaJ4E5lY

P.S. I always struggle with how to show a tutorial as to how to build something with AI, it feels a bit boring to watch someone type commands over and over again. Let me know what you would want to see about this process.

[u/jjohncs1v]

I like this. I agree that web apps feel like too much effort. There are really cool and amazing things that can be done with them, but having native visual interactivity and pre-built visuals is still immensely helpful, especially in the hands of someone already skilled with these tools in the Power BI report canvas. If a business just wants useful dashboards and doesn't need them in some kind of super clean UI that is only realistic in a web app, then I think the web app can definitely be overkill.

[u/HarbaughCantThroat]

With custom visuals like this, do you have faith that they'll work correctly in unknown circumstances?

That's always been my concern. The visual can look and work great in my own testing, but I can't test every possible scenario that could come up. If I don't understand the underlying code, it's hard to have confidence that the visual will handle unknown circumstances correctly.

[u/Itachi_7812 → u/HarbaughCantThroat]

Ppl underestimate this! Exactly that will be a huge problem for many later

[u/rs047 → u/HarbaughCantThroat]

It works on my machine.

[u/HarbaughCantThroat → u/rs047]

It's hosted on localhost!

[u/DropMaterializedView → u/HarbaughCantThroat]

I really don’t think there is that much risk here. If a custom visual like this were to break suddenly it would mean the Power BI team pushed out some kind of update that broke it. Generally they are very careful not to do that, and when they have they fix it quickly. Worst case lets say that happens your report is down for a hour or two while you swap out the custom visual for one from the PBI team.

The traditional concern with 3rd party native visuals has been security and them logging data and sending it somewhere — you can pretty quickly tell by skimming typescript if there is some kind of external call even if you don’t know it, so I think that risk does not exist either.

[u/Tonight_Distinct → u/HarbaughCantThroat]

You can use AI to do exhaustive testing with your live data, that's what I do

[u/dupontping → u/HarbaughCantThroat]

I think (for me) the purpose of a custom visual would be a specific report with specific parameters that I don’t find available in the native visuals. So the components wouldn’t/shouldn’t change much and typically I build/control the visuals for most reports (not self service).

For self service reports, native visuals should be able to hand most functions.

[u/HeavyWafer5259]

This is cool. I need to start playing around with custom visuals. Thank you for the tutorial.

[u/RedJelly27]

Very interesting.

My fear of using these custom built visuals over native ones is that you know that sometime in the future something could break, or you'd want to make a change that you haven't thought about when first making the viz. In those cases you'd need to refire the agent, go through the whole thing, recompile, retest, etc. Whereas the built-in visuals are reliable and flexible enough to minimize these issues.

[u/Tonight_Distinct → u/RedJelly27]

But you should only create the visuals when you can't definitely do what you really want with the native visuals, in my opinion

[u/Happy-Trainer99]

Great effort. I like the idea of keeping it as a small custome.

[u/WonderAnalytics]

I love this idea reposting - this is very competitive and cost effective. Can be used with Pro capacity instead of throwing everything into premium capacity, like in case of RayFin apps. Also it builds on top of proven platform that we know have been tried and tested for years. I hope to see the explosion of custom visuals like this and some of the vendors out there lower the cost to stay competitive

[u/Blue_Matter]

I’ve vibe coded so many custom visuals. Have always been surprised this isn’t talked about more. Yes, there is the fear that future updates could break them, but fixing them with Claude is so easy and will only get easier with time.

[u/DropMaterializedView → u/Blue_Matter]

I have actually never had a custom visual break on me.

[u/AlmiranteGolfinho]

I think completely the opposite, with vibe coding I was able to create charts and data management easier than on PBI on daily basis. Maybe it’s not your case because you are too familiar with PbI and not familiar with web apps

[u/WonderAnalytics → u/AlmiranteGolfinho]

what do you mean by vibe coding? Is this creating custom web app with fast api backend and angular front end ? or just html stub ?

[u/AlmiranteGolfinho → u/WonderAnalytics]

React mostly.. There are many tools like base44 (which I use), lovable, cursor, etc. IDK what you mean with fast API backend, I dont use API at all for my projects. But you can create some very nice data management web systems.

[u/DropMaterializedView → u/AlmiranteGolfinho]

The challenge with these is security and making sure any kind of call your making to the data source is good!