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nathandunlapWTW
Frequent Visitor

Export data to Excel not working in Report Server

My colleague and I successfully connected my DB to Analysis Servers and then a PBI Report Server (August version). Everything looks great, but nothing happens when I try to export the data from a visual to Excel.

The settings on the SSRS instance have EnablePowerBIReportExportData set to true, so the problem may not be in our local download of Power BI.

 

The problem may be in the web application itself because when we turn on the Network capture feature in Developer Tools in the browser and then click Export Data on a grid, we can see a few querydata API requests that succeed followed by a request for a filesaver.min.js script that fails with a 404-Not found error.

This may be a bug that needs a quick fix. What is your assessment?

28 REPLIES 28
PatrickSeidl
Frequent Visitor

Same issue with PBIRS Version 1.2.6648.38132 (March 2018) 

Anonymous
Not applicable

I'm running version 1.2.6660.39920 and do not seem to have the issue.

I'm running server Version 1.2.6660.39920 (March 2018) and do seem to have the issue. Export option from the tabular report goes straight to csv, no other options available.

I've just seen that they brought out a fix at the end of last month, so that will probably fix it 🙂 It was so close to the new version release that I didn't realise it was a new one.

No issue here. have you tried to clean you browser's cache? I'm setting this as default everytime I update the server (lol - it solves lots of issues)

Does anyone have a workaround for the March 2018 version?

lkubat
Frequent Visitor

 

Caveat: I am by no means an expert in IIS this is my best stab at following Ramzivic's advice on setting up a reverse proxy, and it did work for me.

 

1)  Ensure that you have IIS installed

2)  Install Application Request Routing for IIS

3)  Download FileSaver.min.js from github

4)  Create or choose an existing IIS site and drop FileSaver.min.js somewhere in its folder

 image.png

5)  Ensure that you can reach this resource by URL:

 image.png

6)  On this site in IIS, open URL Rewrite

image.png

7)  Click “Add Rule(s)” and select “Reverse Proxy”

image.png

😎  Enter the IP address of your server, ignore outbound rules and hit OK

image.png

9)  We’re not actually using this rule, but it seems to shake something loose in the system. We delete it by reverting our site to parent setting for URL rewrite:

image.png

10)  Now, we set up our actual redirection rule on the server level:

image.png

11)  Configure the rule to take requests for …/externals/filesaver.min.js and route them all to the URL in step 5:

image.png

You may need to restart the PBIRS server, clear cached files on your browser, and offer a blood sacrifice to Technos the Ancient: Dark Lord of Configuration Settings, but after that you should be good to go.

 

To isolate redirection from all the other SSRS crap , you should be able to enter “Yoursite/AnyRandomGarbage/external/filesaver.min.js and the browser should find the filesaver.min.js file you stored in step 4.  If this is not the case, something is not working and I don’t know how to help you.

 

Good luck

lkubat
Frequent Visitor

Side note: you can also use this method to make changes to the UI that you couldn't normally make.

 

You could, for example, copy your sites brand.css file, make some modifications and then reroute all traffic from the old brand.css file to your new edited one.  I used this to hide some objects on screen that I think are taking up too much space:

image.png

 

You may also be able to inject a javascript file that makes arbitrary changes to the site on load.  I haven't tested this yet, but I'm'n'a try to use it to change the name of "Paginated reports" to something that doesn't confuse our users so much.  

Anonymous
Not applicable

We installed the August update yesterday and now have the same issue. Like others said, this is quite a biggie for us so hope fix will be available soon..?

Anonymous
Not applicable

Is there any news on a fix for this as it is proving to be quite a big issue for us. Does anyone have a work around?

We're probably going to wait for the next release. I can't find the link, but I think I read somewhere that they were shooting for Q4 2017. I did find the links below describing a release timeline of about three times a year. If we're counting supported releases (June 2017) and not preview (August 2017), that suggests we may be due for a release sometime in maybe October/November? I'm just guessing. 

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Report-Server/Power-BI-Desktop-for-Report-Server-Release-schedule/t...

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/reportserver-support-timeline/

 

 

As far as workarounds, I've only thought about some ideas, but have not actually done any of this:

  • Create an Excel workbook containing a pivot table connected to your SSAS database. Users would have to build the table they want through the pivot table UI.
  • Create a paginated report (old SSRS report) with a matrix on it. I suspect these can accept a parameter from a dashboard filter, but haven't checked. These will have an export option to send results to formats like PDF or Excel, but the Excel format might have merged cells and extra rows and columns in an attempt to preserve the report appearance.
  • From what I can tell, the site runs self-hosted in its own executable rather than running in IIS where there might be a /scripts directory of some sort where you could copy the missing file, but you could potentially set up IIS or another web server as a reverse proxy to PBIRS for all requests except the filesaver.min.js which you serve directly.
  • Client-side? While you can embed a dashboard on another site (https://www.kasperonbi.com/embedding-power-bi-reports-with-power-bi-report-server/), security restrictions would probably prevent you from forcing it to load filesaver.min.js from a CDN. Maybe if there was a custom visual that also loaded filesaver.min.js, it might make it available to the whole dashboard?

 

Hi all,

 

Just to provide an update on this - we are tracking the bug and will have this fixed for the production release of the next update of PBI RS this fall.  This isn't too far off, so we won't be issuing a fix for this until that time.  

 

Thanks,

 

Chris

Can someone please confirm that "Export Data" from a visual through the browser is possible in PBIRS October '17 GA?

Anonymous
Not applicable

yes, I can also confirm it is working ok in latest release.

No further issues here, works fine.

Hello @dataviznz,

 

yes, it is.

You go to the "..." button on the visual en then to "Export Data"

 

Export data.PNG

MikeHNJ
Frequent Visitor

 Just to add a little detail we're using Power BI Report Server, August 2017 Preview.  On visualizations like Table, the Export Data feature is not working when viewing a Power BI report in the browser.  THe option is available on the menu in the upper-right corner, but nothing happens when you click it.

 

Capturing network traffic in the browser's Developer Tools shows that the browser (this is seen in both IE 11 and Chrome) makes a request for http://powerbiservername/14.0.600.379/externals/filesaver.min.js when you click Export Data, but it receives a 404 (Not Found) response in reply. 

 

An Error is also shown in the console:

message: "Script error for "filesaver"
http://requirejs.org/docs/errors.html#scripterror"

 

Is there a workaround? It looks like all the resources (script, css, etc.) are compiled into DLLs, but is there any way to manually copy the missing filesaver.min.js somewhere and have the web server find it? 

 

 

FileSaver404.jpg

Hi,

I found a workaround for this issue by intsalling quickly ARR role on my Power Bi Server. In my ARR I configured a farm containing just one static server where I put the filesaver.min.js file. A rewrite rule is created to redirect all requests containing filesaver.min.js to the backend Farm. It s working as a charm for me and I could export to csv files. Hope it helps!

Anonymous
Not applicable

Hi, can you explain this in more detail - I might be being a little thick here but what is the ARR role?

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