Frequently Asked Questions

General

How Much Does the Visual Cost?

It's free. And open source.

All development, promotion and support I do for the visual is carried out in my spare time. If you find the visual useful for your needs, or would like me to be able to spend more time developing and supporting it, it is possible to sponsor me, or Buy Me A Coffee ☕.

Will the Visual be Certified?

There is a separate edition of the visual in AppSource, named HTML Content (lite), which is certified. This version has a reduced feature set compared to the regular edition, but conforms to the rules that Microsoft have set out for certified visuals. You can read more about the differences between the two editions on the Editions page.

For the regular edition of the visual, this cannot be certified under the current rules. This allows you to write as much HTML as the Microsoft custom visual sandbox permits you to execute. As such, this does not conform to the current rules, specifically:

Accessing external services or resources. For example, no HTTP/S or WebSocket requests can go out of Power BI to any services.

Whilst the visual does not do this in its source code (as per the Privacy Policy), a user can write HTML that could access externally hosted content such as images, and this is not permitted under certification.

Is the Visual Supported?

I develop and support the visuals in my free time, so they are subject to the MIT License. Both editions are free of charge and open source. If you need to use HTML-based visuals that are formally supported, then there are commercial alternatives detailed on the support page.

If you have a feature request for the visual or are experiencing an issue, then the support page also contains information on this. Please remember that there are limitations in Power BI that prevent some types of content and we can't do much about that, so please be sure to check that page first to see if what you're trying to do is possible or not.

I'll always try and keep the visual as up-to-date as possible in terms of making sure things keep running along with the latest versions of Power BI.

Content

Hyperlinks Don't Work!

Custom visuals aren't allowed to arbitrarily open hyperlinks, but we have an Allow Opening URLs property that can help in some cases. There are some considerations to this also, but everything currently known about is under the linked documentation.

Why Can't I Embed this Particular Video/Web Page/Other Ambitious Thing?

Custom visuals have a number of restrictions imposed upon them by Power BI, so unfortunately some things just won't work. There's a page dedicated to the limitations that we know about, which may help you ascertain whether you're trying to do something that the visual cannot.