🔒 Rights

Only platform administrators have access to this feature, due to the ability to extract a significant amount of information from the platform.

📝 Notes

This method only works with the desktop version of PowerBI; the web version does not allow downloading CSV files from a URL.

Elium provides a straightforward way to extract metadata (including template fields) from articles in CSV format via a URL.

This enables Elium to connect directly to dashboard and analysis tools such as PowerBI, Tableau, or Data Studio, with real-time data updates.

It is strongly recommended to use a dedicated user account to connect Elium with tools like PowerBI.

To do this, navigate to the administration panel in the "Users" tab of the "General" section.

Then click on "Add a user".

The user management window in Elium.

Fill in an email address, a first name, and a last name. These do not have to be real. To identify this account as one used to connect Elium to PowerBI, you can use the email address "powerbi@elium.com" with "PowerBI Elium" as the first and last name.

Leave "Send invitation" unchecked and select "Password" as the connection type, since SSO does not work; we are creating a dedicated PowerBI user account here.

Metadata extraction requires the system administration role, so you need to assign this role. There is no need to assign any particular space to this account.

The languages have no impact, so you can leave them as they are.

Here is the final version:

Creation of a user for the PowerBI integration

Click on "Add".

Next, you need to assign a password to this account. To do this, click on "Option" on the far left in the user table for the newly created user, then select "Set a password".

Click on "Choose the password myself" and enter a strong password. We emphasize the importance of password complexity, as this is a system administrator account. Use a secure password storage tool if necessary.

🚨 PowerBI doesn't support the @, /, and : characters in the password with basic authentication, so be careful not to include them in your password.

To start, go to the advanced search, available by clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the main search bar.

Once in the search, simply filter the articles of the platform according to your desired criteria. Once you are satisfied with the results, click on the button labeled with three small dots and select "Configure a search export".

An advanced search filtered on the "Release Notes" template will extract all the metadata and fields of the release notes, for example.

This action opens a popup window providing access to a URL.

This URL will be used to configure PowerBI to automatically retrieve the metadata in the tool.

Now let's open PowerBI to create a new dashboard with the metadata from Elium.

PowerBI desktop version

Click on the "Get data" button in the toolbox at the top left. In the popup window, select "Others" and then "Web".

The window showing you the different ways to retrieve data.

Next, click on "Connect".

Copy the URL here.

In this window, paste the URL you copied from Elium. You can leave "Basic" checked and click on "OK" to proceed to the next step.

Next, we need to authenticate PowerBI on your Elium platform. To do this, we will use the account created in the first step.

Select the "Basic" option in the left pane of the window, then enter the email address and password of the dedicated account. The third field can remain as it is.

Click on "Connect".

Authentication window in PowerBI

PowerBI will then display a preview of your advanced search metadata extraction from your Elium platform.

Overview of Elium article metadata in PowerBI.

Now just click on "Load" to import this data into your PowerBI dashboard.

There you go, now it's up to you! 📊