absentify Power BI connector documentation

Interested in analyzing data trends to optimize operations or efficiently handle employee absences? As an HR admin, this integration empowers you to unlock actionable insights from absence data and enhance operational decision-making. With the Microsoft Power BI Connector offered by absentify, you can elevate how you analyze absence planning and internal scheduling.

Important: This feature is available exclusively in the Plus plan. Check our Plans and Pricing to explore how absentify can maximize your data analysis capabilities.

Why use the Power BI connector?

The Power BI connector allows you to:

Visualize absence trends to identify areas for improvement.
Create dashboards tailored to your organization’s needs.
Integrate absence data seamlessly into broader business intelligence workflows.

The custom connector (.mez) supports manual data refreshes only — scheduled refreshes in the Power BI Service are not available for it. To schedule automatic refreshes, use the direct API integration below, which does work with Power BI Service scheduled refresh.

Quick start guide

Installing the connector

Download the custom connector
- Get the absentify Power BI Custom Connector (.mez) file here: Download link
Save the file
- Place the .mez file in the folder:
  Documents\Power BI Desktop\Custom Connectors
- If this folder doesn’t exist, create it manually.
Enable Power BI Desktop to use custom connectors
- Open Power BI Desktop.
- Navigate to File > Options and Settings > Options.
- In the left menu, select Security.
- Under Data Extensions, select:
  - Allow any extension to load without validation or warning.
- Select OK and restart Power BI Desktop.

Configuring absentify for integration

Generate an API key
- Sign in to absentify.
- Go to Settings > Integrations > API Key.
- Generate a new API key and save it securely for later use.
Connect Power BI to absentify
- In Power BI Desktop, go to Home > Get Data.
- Scroll to Other and select absentify.
- Enter the API key when prompted.

Using direct API requests

For automation and advanced queries, you can integrate Power BI directly with the absentify API using Power Query.

For these queries to refresh in the Power BI Service (not just Power BI Desktop), always pass https://api.absentify.com as the static base URL and put the endpoint path in RelativePath and parameters in Query, exactly as shown below. A fully dynamic URL works in Desktop but fails on the Service. See Automating data refreshes.

Example: fetching members data

let
    apiKey = "your_api_key_here",
    response = Web.Contents(
        "https://api.absentify.com",
        [
            RelativePath = "api/v1/members",
            Headers = [ #"X-API-KEY" = apiKey ]
        ]
    ),
    jsonResponse = Json.Document(response),
    responseTable = Table.FromList(jsonResponse, Splitter.SplitByNothing(), null, null, ExtraValues.Error),
    expandedTable = Table.ExpandRecordColumn(responseTable, "Column1", {"id", "name", "email"})
in
    expandedTable

Example: fetching requests per day

let
    apiKey = "your_api_key_here",
    response = Web.Contents(
        "https://api.absentify.com",
        [
            RelativePath = "api/v1/requests_per_day",
            Query = [
                start = "2024-01-01T00:00:00Z",
                end = "2024-01-31T23:59:59Z",
                status = "APPROVED"
            ],
            Headers = [ #"X-API-KEY" = apiKey ]
        ]
    ),
    jsonResponse = Json.Document(response),
    responseTable = Table.FromList(jsonResponse, Splitter.SplitByNothing(), null, null, ExtraValues.Error)
in
    responseTable

Automating data refreshes

Unlike the custom connector, the direct API integration does support scheduled refresh in the Power BI Service. Two things are required:

Keep the base URL static. Always pass https://api.absentify.com as the first argument to Web.Contents and put the endpoint path in RelativePath (and parameters in Query), exactly as in the examples above. A fully dynamic URL works in Power BI Desktop but fails on the Service with credential/firewall errors.
Set the data source credential to Anonymous. After publishing, open Dataset → Settings → Data source credentials, edit the credentials for https://api.absentify.com, and select Anonymous. The API key travels in the X-API-KEY header, so do not select OAuth2, Basic, or Organizational account — those fail with an OAuth error (DMTS_OAuthFailedToGetResourceIdError).

Once both are set, configure your refresh schedule as usual under Dataset → Settings → Scheduled refresh.

​Why use the Power BI connector?

​Quick start guide

​Installing the connector

​Configuring absentify for integration

​Using direct API requests

​Example: fetching members data

​Example: fetching requests per day

​Automating data refreshes

Why use the Power BI connector?

Quick start guide

Installing the connector

Configuring absentify for integration

Using direct API requests

Example: fetching members data

Example: fetching requests per day

Automating data refreshes