Defect / Bug with Fast Combine and the Personal Gateway

[tbush]

Hi,

I have found a bug with the Power BI website and the Personal Gateway refreshing a data source that is querying a web service.

Defect Summary:

Querying a web service with Power BI Desktop works fine with 'Ignore Privacy Levels' turned on.

Enabling Fast Combine in the Personal Gateway does not allow the Power BI website to refresh the data source.

It gives the following error:

[Unable to combine data] Section1/QueryName/AutoRemovedColumns1 references other queries or steps, so it may not directly access a data source. Please rebuild this data combination.

Expected Behaviour:

Turning Fast Combine on in the Personal Gateway should ignore privacy levels and allow the Power BI website to refresh the data source, just how it works in Power BI Desktop.

Details:

The web service requires authentication with a logon method that generates a key. This key is then passed to a seperate method that requests data from the web service.

I have implemented this using Web.Contents with a subquery that queries the login method. This approach works fine in Power BI Desktop by telling it to Ignore Privacy Levels. (i.e Fast Combine).

I am passing the full web service query using [Relative Path] and [Query] within the options field. This allows me to set up a refresh in the Power BI website using anonymous authentication.

Next, I published the .pbix to the Power BI website and tell it to Connect Directly. It failed with the following error:

[Unable to combine data] Section1/QueryName/AutoRemovedColumns1 references other queries or steps, so it may not directly access a data source. Please rebuild this data combination.

I did some more reading and saw that the Power BI Personal Gateway allowed me to turn on fast combine

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-refresh-enable-fast-combine/

I followed these instructions (nb: they need updating as the folder path to the xml file is wrong). I also had to add a dummy data connection to an on premesis sql data source so I could tell the data source to refresh using the Personal Gateway. However, I still got the same error message even with Fast Combine enabled. This is unexpected as the Fast Combine setting should allow the web service query to work.

[tbush]

Note that I don't have a step called AutoRemovedColumns1 in the query that is coming up in the error so I think this is a bug.

[v-haibl-msft]

@tbush

Could you please provide the PBIX file or the queries in Advanced Editor to me? I’d like to have a try to see if I can repro it locally.

Best Regards,

Herbert

[tbush]

Herbert, I have pmed you. We need to find another web service to build a test case off as this one is sensitive to my client.

[v-haibl-msft]

@tbush

I haven’t found such a similar web service to repro your issue. I suggest you to create a support ticket at http://support.powerbi.com (see bottom of page).

Best Regards,

Herbert