RLS not working with former non-viewer users

[Anonymous]

I published a report in a workspace.

The report needed Row Level Security in order to work correctly.

The workspace had several users and some of them had a "member" level of access.

This led to a problem, as RLS works only with "viewer" users, as stated here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/enterprise/service-admin-rls.

Changing their level of access to "viewer" did not solve the problem.

The only viable solution was creating a second workspace, add the colleagues as viewers, then RLS began to work correctly.

TL;DR if a user had in the past a role different than viewer in a workspace, it seems that RLS will never work for them in that workspace, even after changing the workspace access level

[v-xiaoyan-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

I did a simple test based on your description and here are the steps I took to reproduce it.

Prerequisites.
I have a test account A in my workspace whose role as a member has been ongoing for several months.

Power BI Desktop Version: 2.114.803.0 64-bit (February 2023)
Power BI Service Version:13.0.20105.47
Browser: Microsoft Edge

Steps:

1. I configured RLS in Power BI Desktop, Rule is to limit the user to see only the content of [Germany]. Then publish it to Power BI Service.
2. Add Role A to this RLS in Power BI Service, which is a member at this time. It can see all the contents of the report.
3. I change A's permissions from member to viewer and open the report again, A can only see the contents of [Germany].

The conclusion is that I did not reproduce your problem and it may be due to some delay in the settings taking effect.

If I have misunderstood your needs or if you have more information to complete, please feel free to let me know.

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Caitlyn

[Anonymous]

Hi @v-xiaoyan-msft ,

you are right, I was misjudging the problem source.

The underlying dataset gets updated through an on-premises data gateway. It looks like every time the data gateway scheduled update kicks in, the RLS stops working. It works again when I re-publish the report with Power BI Desktop, but doing so, we lose the capability to update the data set automatically.

The storage mode is "Import", not DirectQuery.

Looking through the documentation, is it possible that RLS is not compliant with imported storage by data gateway?

Thanks

[Anonymous]

I confirm the problem was the combination RLS/Import storage mode/On-premises data gateway.

Transitioning from Import to Direct Query storage mode did solve the problem.

Thanks