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glenncogar
Advocate I
Advocate I

Problems getting data from SharePoint lists since upgrade to SharePoint 2013

I have been using Power BI Desktop to connect to internal SharePoint sites (via their URL) and access data in sharepoint lists on the sites.  This has been working reasonably well but since an upgrade to SharePoint 2013 I can not reliably access the data.  Refreshing the data often causes a 'timeout' after 100 seconds and I get an error message and the data is not refreshed.

 

I am not using an ODATA connection as they are not configured on the SharePoint sites I need to access for the data.

 

I have found that if I make a simple Excel -> SharePoint connection to download the data first to an Excel spreadsheet it works well and returns the data quite quickly.  I can then connect Power BI Desktop to the spreadsheet and make things work but its a very round about way of achieving what I need.

 

Has anyone else experienced similar problems and if yes did you resolve the issue(s)?

2 REPLIES 2
Greg_Deckler
Super User
Super User

I have not seen this with our on-premises SharePoint 2013 installation at all. I have connected to dozens and dozens of lists on that farm with no issues at all. Makes me wonder if there is something going on with your SharePoint farm. You may want to take a look at the Event Log and Correlation Logs on those servers and see if you can troubleshoot what is going on.

 

Something else, have you encountered this with existing connections or with brand new connections to the SharePoint farm, or both?


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@Greg_Deckler Thanks for your reply.  It seems to be for any connection (new or existing) to a SharePoint site. 

 

In the meantime, since I posted my issue, I have updated the connections to use ODATA to my SharePoint site and this works much better.  I get a list of available ODATA sources be going to  https://<my sharepoint site url>/_vti_bin/ListData.svc and it gives me an XML document listing of available ODATA sources on the site.  I just select the ones I need.  The connections are much faster and dont time out as they do if I enter the URL for the SharePoint site.  I didnt have to configure anything on the SharePoint site, apparently ODATA is already configured to work.

 

In Power BI Desktop the difference is Get Data -> point to URL for Web versus Get Data -> ODATA (Both are under Other in Get Data).

 

I hope this is of help to others who may have a similar issue.

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