Recently in Power BI, a new feature was added for Paginated Reports e-mail subscriptions where you could optionally add a preview image in the body of your e-mail message. By default, this is the first page of your report. However, it doesn’t have to be. For example, in my e-mail subscription, I see the following preview image –
But when I view the report in the PDF attachment or in the web, I see the following report links as my first page –
How is this possible?
Well, one of the cool things you can do with Paginated Reports is set the visibility of items in your report to be conditional. You do this by adding an expression that sets the condition for when it should be shown or hidden. Since the preview image in your e-mail subscription uses the “IMAGE” output format, all I did was set the visibility of an item to be conditional based on that. So I took all of the items you see in that preview image and added them to a tablix, then made that conditionally visible based on the following expression –
=ucase(Globals!RenderFormat.Name) <> “IMAGE”
Now, the report renderer knows to hide that part of the report whenever the renderer is something other than the “IMAGE” output format. I’ve attached the sample report below so you can try this out yourself. You can test this in the Power BI service (if you have Premium) by setting up a new e-mail subscription with it, or in Power BI Report Builder by exporting it to a TIFF file.
Thanks for reading!
Christopher Finlan 