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dan1480
Regular Visitor

Content Pack update caused custom reports to disappear

A couple of years ago I created a content pack and shared it with my organization.  Many users had copied the original content pack and created their own custom reports.  When I updated the content pack recently - by replacing one report with a newer report - several users emailed me saying that some of their customised reports had disappeared.

 

Some of the reports are still listed in the "Recents" list.  But when the user clicks on the report name they are shown a message that says "Sorry, we couldn't find that report.  It may have been deleted or you may not have access to view it."  The reports are no longer shown in the users' "My Workspace".ReportMissing.png

 

I've just come off the phone with Microsoft support.  They said:

  1. There was an update in June 2018 that has caused content packs created before June 2018 to behave unpredictably.
  2. There is no way to get back the missing reports.
  3. There is no way to prevent this problem happening again in the future.
  4. Don't use Content Packs, use Apps.

Has anyone else experienced this problem?

4 REPLIES 4
v-yulgu-msft
Employee
Employee

Hi @dan1480,

 

Yes. As you said, the if the dataset is removed from content pact, those customized reports related to this dataset would be removed together. Per my knowledge, when you create a copy of the content pack, the new version retains its link to the original dataset. Besides, any report including the common report hosted in your own workspace, is generated based on dataset. Once its linked dataset is removed, where does it obtain data from and how to display visuals?

 

Regards,

Yuliana Gu

Community Support Team _ Yuliana Gu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

Hi @v-yulgu-msft,

 

Thanks for your reply.

 

I guess my problem was that it was not clear to me that customised reports have a persistent link to the original dataset.  I thought that if a user copied and customised a content pack, it became completely decoupled from the original content pack - the dashboards, the reports and datasets.  And so a user's customised reports would remain unaffected by updates to the original content pack.  Turns out, this isn't true.

 

Regarding republishing an updated content pack, the Microsoft documentation states,

 

"Group members who have customized the content pack receive a notification that there is a new version. They can go to AppSource and get the updated content pack without losing their personalized version. They'll now have 2 versions: the personalized version and the updated content pack."

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-organizational-content-pack-manage-update-delete

 

This is what threw me off.

 

It might be useful to include a warning that removing datasets will irreversibly delete any user generated reports that were using this dataset - reinstating the old report and dataset will not bring the custom reports back.  A warning at the time of updating the content pack might also be a good idea.

 

Thanks,

Daniel

sampathkumar
Frequent Visitor

How you connect to Microsoft support, can you please tell me th detailed procedure. In your issue the report which you replaced was used by some people so that's why got error message. publish same report as befor so that you won't get issues. let  us know is it resolves your issue. 

Hi Sampath.  I raised a support ticket with Microsoft.  They called me back.  Unfortunately, they were not particularly helpful.

 

The content pack had a report called "Sales report v1".  Users had copied the content pack and created custom reports from this report, under a variety of different names.

 

When I updated the content pack I replaced "Sales report v1" with a report called "Sales report v2".  Any report that our users had created by modifying "Sales report v1" immediately disappeared.

 

I tried adding "Sales report v1" back into the content pack.  Sadly, our users' custom reports did not reappear.

 

I have sinced discovered that if I had left the dataset for Sales report v1 in the content pack, our users' custom reports would not have disappeared.  Lesson learnt: When deleting a report from a content pack DO NOT delete the related dataset or your users' custom reports will also disappear.

 

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