Below are the steps you can follow to establish a connection to Cinchy from PowerBI.
Queries in Cinchy are what PowerBI connects to. If you don't have one that represents your dataset, you'll need to create that first. In this example, we will use a query called API Test:
When you open the query you'll notice on the right-hand side a green button that says REST API
Click on the REST API button and you'll see the below popup. In the textbox is the URL for the API endpoint. You can click the clipboard icon to copy the URL.
In this example the URL is:
http://your.cinchy.instance.domain/API/YouQueryDomain/API Test
You'll notice that the structure here is <your Cinchy instance URL>/API/<the name of your query> and optionally at the end you may have querystring parameters. For access via PowerBI we're going to use Basic authentication and a result format of CSV, which uses a slightly different URL endpoint. Instead of /API/ in the URL, it's going to be /BasicAuthAPI/ and we're going to add a querystring parameter - ResultFormat=CSV. For this example your URL for accessing this dataset through PowerBI is going to be:
http://your.cinchy.instance.domain/BasicAuthAPI/YourQueryDomain/API Test?ResultFormat=CSV
Launch PowerBI. To access the dataset, click on Get Data and then select Blank Query from the menu:
In the window that launches there is a textbox where you can enter an expression. Here you will enter the below text (note your modified URL from Step 4 between quotes):
=Csv.Document(Web.Contents("http://your.cinchy.instance.domain/BasicAuthAPI/YourQueryDomain/API Test?ResultFormat=CSV"))
Once you've entered that text either click the checkmark to the left of the input box or click away and it will automatically attempt to run the expression. What you should then see is a prompt to edit credentials.
Click the Edit Credentials button and you should see the following popup:
Select Basic on the left, enter the credentials for a Cinchy User Account that has access to run this query and select the level at which to apply these settings (only if you want to, by default it's the root URL). This process of entering your credentials won't occur with each query, it's just the first time and then they're saved locally.
Once you click Connect you should see the data
You can now apply any transformations to the dataset that you wish. For instance, in this example we need to click the button at the top that says Use First Row as Headers, but you may have additional changes. In this example we also changed the name from Query1 to Product Roadmap
Once you're done, click Close & Apply. Now the metadata shows up on the right hand side and you can begin to use it to create your visualizations
