ODBC Credentials are requested on different machine, even with same DSN name

[CLEARIFY]

We create ubiquitous DSN's for our product so that when one person sends a spreadsheet, powerpivot, etc file to someone else, all they have to do is open it up on their machine, and refresh the data - and voila they get their own stuff, without messsing with connection strings passwords, etc.

This has worked fine over the years with a variety of applications that we include examples for  EXCEPT for Power BI.

When somebody opens up the Power BI shells we provide, it asks for credentials the first time.  After which, they are not prompted again, but it creates help desk issues obviously.  They are expecting PowerBI to just refresh the data off the same DSN.

Since this works for Excel, PowerPivot, PowerQuery, I would assume this is a bug in Power BI, as we are not doing anything different with regard to the initial connection - it is strictly to an ODBC DSN - with no parameters.  No different than how we connect the Excel, PowerpIvot and PowerQuery connections.

I know somebody will ask "why do you have the password in the first place" - that is something that can't be changed.

BTW this is a Sybase SQLAnyhwere Driver V 17  We also had the same issue when we had Version 12 fo the driver.

Thoughts?

[v-ljerr-msft]

Hi @CLEARIFY,

As per reply in this similar thread, it seems to be an expected behavior in Power BI. 

No passwords are stored in the pbix file. The credential for the data source are stored on the machine which have the .pbix created C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Power BI Desktop\User.zip.

Regards

[CLEARIFY]

If the password is stored in the DSN itself, then why is this expected behavior?  It certainly isn't in its sister product PowerPivot.