SmartSheet Attachments in Power BI

The out-of-the-box Power BI connector doesn't include attachments to sheets or rows. But we can use the SmartSheet API to pull all attachments. I have successfully tested in Power BI.

However, there is a catch…

SmartSheet uses AWS s3 as the file store
The documents are stored as private
The full URI returned by the api includes the query text needed to authorize access with AWS s3
The expiration is set to 120000 ms — 2 minutes(!)

How can we alter the expiration to a longer time, 24 hrs for example?

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Alex Argumedo

As far as I know, it is not possible, unless an SS Engineering guy comes and do a custom solution for you. I had to change the logic of my code in order to work around this issue, I request the download url only before I need it. If that is not possible, then you need your own bucket, collect all attachments you need and then call them from there.

Marty Schlafer

These options are unpleasant — managing a duplicate store of attachments or hiring SS to provide a custom solution.

Instead, we'll explore using an intermediary such as Power Automate cloud flow.
* Store a URL with the Smart Sheet data consumed in Power BI that links to our Power Automate cloud flow.
* The cloud flow triggers on HTTP(S) request with parameters for Smart Sheet API to get a "fresh" AWS s3 document URL.
* On clicking the URL in Power BI it calls the cloud flow which in turn issues a redirect to the AWS s3 secured document.

Alex Argumedo

yes, that is what I do, but with an small code that goes and repeat the request, once I have the ID of the sheet and the ID of the Attachment, it is just a matter of call it on demand. If Power automate is a cost effective solution for you, that is perfect.

Marty Schlafer

Additional note… Power BI doesn't have the ability to bundle data as JSON into a HTTP request body, so any parameters passed to Power Automate cloud flow would be exposed as query text. As I want to make the cloud flow sterile and not contain the api client key for Smart Sheet and instead pass as a parameter, I'll need to obfuscate/encrypt the query text in the URL to be safe.

Zanne_Mari

Anyone know if this capability has progressed?

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