Skip to content

Month: October 2019

Keep your Power BI SharePoint reports current with Microsoft Flow

Published October 18, 2019

Power BI is without question the best way to report on data in SharePoint lists. The query tools available in Power Query make working with SharePoint data relatively painless, an the cached dataset means that reports are run against an optimized copy of the list data, not the data itself.

This latter distinction, while removing the performance issues of systems that query lists directly, also introduces problems with data latency. The report will never be fully “up to date”, as it needs to be refreshed on a periodic basis.

Consider the following scenario. A Power BI report has been built that uses data from a SharePoint list. That report has been embedded on a SharePoint page in the same site. A user adds an item to the list, and then navigates to the page to see the updated report. Unfortunately, that report won’t get updated until the next scheduled refresh.

This has been a significant problem, until the recent release of the new “Refresh a dataset” action in Microsoft Flow.

It is a relatively simple procedure to add a simple 1 step flow to any SharePoint list that is triggered when an item is created, updated, or deleted. This flow simply needs to add the “Refresh a dataset” action, that is configured for the relevant dataset, and these embedded reports will be updated very shortly after the data is modified.

Alternatively, the flow can be triggered by a timer, allowing you to create your own schedule (every 5 minutes, etc) that is not hardwired to run at the top or bottom of any given hour.

A few caveats should be kept in mind when using this action however.

While this action gives us much finer grained control over when refreshes happen, all of the current license restrictions remain in place. For datasets located in the shared capacity, only 8 refreshes per day are allowed.

For datasets in dedicated capacities (Premium), there are no limits to the number of refreshes. The limit of 48 per day is a UI restriction, not a licensing restriction. However, refresh can utilize significant resources, particularly memory, so you’ll want to ensure that you have significant resources to support the update frequency.

Finally, the load on the source data system should be considered. Refresh will pull a significant amount of data every time it is run.

Caveats aside, this new flow action is a welcome relief to those that need greater control of how their reports are updated.

3 Comments

Fixing Power BI Report Builder Connection Errors

Published October 11, 2019

Power BI Report Builder is Microsoft’s design tool for building Paginated reports in Power BI. It is based on Microsoft Report Builder (formerly SQL Server Reporting Services Report Builder), but has been optimized for the Power BI service.

One of the most important capabilities of Power BI Report Builder is the ability to connect to datasets that have been published to the service. If you have done this, and spent any significant amount of time building reports, you may have come across some puzzling connection errors that are caused by the same thing.

After initially creating a connection and building a “Paginated dataset” (not to be confused with a Power BI service dataset), and then spending some time designing your report, when you select the “Run” option from the ribbon, you may be presented with the “Failed to preview report” error shown at the top of this article. Selecting the details button reveals more information:

A similar error can be found under the same conditions when editing a Paginated dataset’s query with the Query designer tool. Selecting this tool can result in the error “Unable to connect to data source xxxxxxxx”, and the details button reveals another “Unauthorized” error.

What’s worse in this case is that when you select OK, a dialog box appears prompting you to enter a set of credentials.

There are no combination of credentials that you can enter that will fix the connection to the data source. This dialog box was designed for classic paginated connections, not for connections to published data sets. You should select cancel if you see this dialog box.

What is happening in both of these cases is that the token acquired from the Power BI service has expired, and Report Builder does not automatically fetch a new one. There are a couple of ways to deal with this problem.

If you have saved the RDL file to a local file system, you can close Report Builder and reopen it. That will re-establish the data connection. You could also choose to save the RDL directly into the Power BI workspace. This will also re-establish the connection. You can do this by selecting File – Save as and selecting Power BI Service.

You can then choose which workspace to save the file in. This also removes the need to upload the file into the service when you want to publish it – saving and publishing are the same thing in this scenario.

If you are editing a file directly in the service, these errors will still appear after periods of no data retrieval activity, but the connection can re-established simply by saving the report. You can look at the errors as a way of prompting you to save your work .

4 Comments