Action Tasks

Administrator

DataCentral goes beyond static reporting by allowing you to turn insights into immediate action. Action Tasks make a Power BI visual interactive — when a user clicks a configured visual, DataCentral captures the data behind it and sends it to an external endpoint of your choice.

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1. What is an Action Task?

An Action Task turns a Power BI visual into a trigger. When a user clicks the visual, DataCentral sends the underlying data to a configured URL via HTTP. This bridges the gap between viewing data and acting on it, without leaving the report.

Common Use Cases

• CRM Updates: A user identifies a high-risk account and clicks the visual to automatically create a follow-up task in Salesforce or HubSpot.
• Inventory Alerts: A user sees a stockout warning and triggers a restock request to the procurement team's Slack channel.
• Support Tickets: A user identifies a data anomaly and creates a Jira or Zendesk ticket containing the relevant data points.

2. Creating an Action Task

To create an Action Task, you must have Tenant Administrator privileges.

1. Navigate to Administration > Tasks.
2. Click Create New Task.
3. Enter a Name for the task.
4. Select the action type:
   • Interact with report — triggers when a user clicks a configured visual in a Power BI report (see below).
   • HTTP Request — sends a direct HTTP request to an endpoint without any report interaction. Only requires a URL, HTTP method (GET or POST), and an optional request body for POST.
5. If you selected Interact with report, continue with the steps below.

Interact with Report

1. In the dropdown, select the Power BI item you want to configure. Wait for the report to finish embedding.
2. Click the visual in the report that should act as the trigger. This populates the Visual Name field.
3. Enter the URL of the endpoint that should receive the request.
4. Select the HTTP method — GET or POST.
5. Configure any optional request options (see below).
6. Save the task.

Advanced Visual Targeting

The Visual Name field supports comma-separated values, allowing a single task to trigger on multiple visuals. Prefix a visual name with + to export the visual's underlying (detail-level) data instead of the default summarized (aggregated) data.

Example: chart1, +table2 — triggers on both chart1 (summarized data) and table2 (underlying data).

3. Request Options

Depending on the HTTP method selected, the following options are available:

GET

Option	Description
Load URL on top of report	Opens the URL in an overlay on top of the report after the visual is clicked.
Add session metadata to request	Appends information about the current session (e.g., user, tenant) to the request.
Add visual payload to request	Includes the data from the clicked visual as query parameters in the request.

POST

Option	Description
Load URL on top of report	Opens the URL in an overlay on top of the report after the visual is clicked.
Add session metadata to request	Appends information about the current session (e.g., user, tenant) to the request body.
Add visual payload to request	Includes the data from the clicked visual in the request body.
Add custom message to request	Allows you to include a static custom message or payload in the request body.