Power BI is a powerful reporting tool developed by Microsoft. It is used across many industries to create advanced analytical views of data. It is possible to leverage the Nektar API to view your Nektar data within Power BI. Here's how.
This article assumes a basic understanding of APIs and how they work. Also, one caveat of this solution is that your authentication token will expire after 30 days and must be refreshed/re-entered. This is because Power BI cannot properly handle bearer token authentication APIs.
Opening the API documentation
First, go to the Nektar API home page and click the Documentation link.
Nektar's Swagger API documentation displays. This interactive documentation allows you to view and test endpoints without coding knowledge. For this article, we are interested in the Authenticate endpoint. This endpoint will enable us to enter a username and password and receive an authentication token that we will use later in Power BI.
Make sure group-level API permissions are enabled in the Permission Manager (Misc > API).
Go to the Authentication heading and expand the Post method. Click the Try it out button in the top right corner. Enter your username, password, and (optionally) an IANA timezone string. Scroll to the bottom of the section and click Execute.
If all goes well, Swagger returns a 200 code and response message with an access_token value. Copy the value (without the quotations). You will need it in Power BI.
Opening Power BI
Next, open your Power BI account. Click Get Data and then choose Web.
In the popup, select Advanced and enter your API endpoint URL. This endpoint contains the data you want to use in Power BI. In this example, we'll use the datasource endpoint.
Next, add an HTTP header at the bottom. Select Authorization. Copy the token value from Swagger and paste it here. Click OK.
Make sure Anonymous authentication is selected (since we already added an authentication token in the header value) and click Connect. That's it! You can now use your Nektar API endpoint data within Power BI.
