Missing credentials after publishing and Web Connector not authenticating in PBI Report Server

[Coruscate]

Hi PBIers,

I could really use your support in a problem I am facing.

I have a dashboard that uses the Web Connector to access a XML file exposed via a webservice (a Workday report exposed as a webservice). Basic Authentication is used and the data can be accessed and refreshed in PBI Desktop perfectly.

However, when I publish the dashboard to PBI Report Server and want to schedule refreshes I am unable to. I go to view the associated embedded Data Source for the dashboard in report server I notice a few things:

1. The connection string only contains the URL without any parameters (everything from the "?" onwards has been removed).
2. Under "Credentials" the authentication type now shows "Anonymous" rather than the "Basic Authentication" I entered in PBI Desktop.
3. Even when I change the authentication to "Basic Authentication" and enter the correct credentials (yes I've triple checked they are correct) I receive an error stating "Unable to connect to the remote server". It is also worth noting that for diagnostic purposes I have tried creating an separate Data Source in PBI Report Server using the URL (the truncated version) with the Base Authentication credentials that has sucessfully connected upon testing.

Things I have attempted are:

1. In PBI Desktop, using anonymous authentication and passing the credentials either at the start of the url (e.g. https://username:mypassword@example.com) or in the query editor as Web.Contents("https://example.com?q=1",[Headers=[#"Authorization"="Basic EncodedCredsHere"]]). The web page seems to be fine with the former if I type it into a browser, but PBI Desktop says that it can't authenticate with the (Anonymous) credentials provided.
2. The Workday report exposed as a service is available in JSON, CSV, XML and a few other formats. I have tried accessing all formats using the Web Connector with the same results.

I am now considering investigating exporting the reports as Excel documents somewhere to be accessed by PBI Report Server in some other way, but this seems like an unnecessary maintenance and complexity for something that should be a pretty standard use case for PBI Report Server.

Any support, advice or assistance would be highly appreicated. Please, before I pull all of my hair out 🙂