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In PowerBI, I'd like to get data from a website requiring authentication (http://kdp.amazon.com/). Going to New Source, Web, Advanced, doesn't show me anything that looks promising. Hopefully I'm missing something.

My ideal would be to go to a specific webpage (post authentication), and click on a link that allows me to download an excel spreadsheet.

Thanks for any ideas/pointers.

Foxan Ng
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Sylvia
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2 Answers2

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It depends, and chances are slim for your case.

If it is a direct URL to where the data or file resided (e.g data is on the page, file link, web API endpoint), then it depends on what kind of authentication method is used by the website, and whether you can provide the credentials through the Web.Contents options. (commonly used for web API authentication)

If it requires further navigation (e.g. click, type in info) to access the data / file after the authentication, then the answer is no.

Foxan Ng
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That type of data scraping can be accomplished using a headless browser and a scripting/macro engine.

For example xvfb (X virtual framebuffer) + firefox + iMacros. I do consider this beyond power bi's capabilities. If you wish to pursue this further here are some references:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xvfb

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/imacros-for-firefox/

Again, similar but using an alternate toolset:

http://scraping.pro/use-headless-firefox-scraping-linux/

BTW, having done this once or twice before - this is not a great value proposition. If you have to resort to this sort of tactic, it may be time to consider why the developers didn't expose this functionality to you in an API - maybe there is a good reason?

Alexander Toptygin
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