How to Add Row-Level Security in Power BI
Row-Level Security (RLS) in Power BI allows you to restrict access to data based on predefined rules, ensuring that different users see different subsets of the data. This is useful when you have sensitive or confidential information that should only be visible to specific individuals or groups.
Steps to Implement Row-Level Security:
- Create Security Roles:
- Open your Power BI Desktop and go to the “Modeling” tab.
- Click on the “Manage Roles” button.
- Create new roles based on your security requirements. For example, you can create roles like “Managers,” “Sales Team,” etc.
- Define Rules for Each Role:
- Select a role and click on the “Add Filter” button.
- In the Expression section, define the rule that determines which data should be visible to users belonging to that role. For instance, you can use the DAX expression “Sales[Region] = ‘North'” to show only data from the North region to users in the “Managers” role.
- Repeat this step for each role, defining the appropriate rules for each.
- Publish Your Report:
- Save your Power BI report.
- Publish it to the Power BI service.
- Assign Users to Roles:
- Open the Power BI service and go to the workspace where your report is published.
- Click on the “Datasets” tab and select your dataset.
- In the “Security” section, click on “Add group or user.”
- Assign users or groups to the roles you created earlier.
Example:
Let’s say you have a sales dataset with columns like “Region,” “Salesperson,” and “Revenue.”
You want to restrict access to the data based on the user’s role:
- Managers should see data for all regions and salespeople.
- Sales Team A should only see data for the North region.
- Sales Team B should only see data for the South region.
To implement this, you would create three roles: “Managers,” “Sales Team A,” and “Sales Team B.”
For the “Managers” role, you would define the rule as “Sales[Region] = Sales[Region].” This ensures that managers can see all regions.
For the “Sales Team A” role, the rule would be “Sales[Region] = ‘North’.” This filters the data to show only sales in the North region.
Similarly, for the “Sales Team B” role, the rule would be “Sales[Region] = ‘South’.”
By assigning users or groups to these roles in the Power BI service, each user will only see the data that corresponds to their role.