Personal Gateway: On-Prem File Refresh and UNC Paths

[cbailiss]

Hello

I have a Power BI model (pbix file) that sources data from a TXT file.  When the model is uploaded into Power BI Online, I am able to refresh the data via the Personal Gateway from the TXT file on my local hard disk (C drive).  

If the model instead points at the same file in a network share, I am unable to set the credentials in Power BI online to perform the refresh.  I have tried both the UNC path (\\server\share\...) to the file and the mapped drive path (H:\...).  The error I receive in Power BI Online is "Failed to update data source credentials: We are unable to connect to the data source. Please ensure that data source is accessible.  The network path was not found.".

Is this a supported scenario (using UNC paths?).  Has anyone else got this working?

The Personal Gateway is the latest version.  It is running under my domain account, which does have access to the share (i.e. it is the same account I log into my machine as and I can browse to the share in Windows Explorer and open/edit the files).

I have looked in the event logs for any issues, but absolutely nothing is logged.  Is there some additional logging that can be enabled?

Thanks

Chris

[Chrisjr]

Hello @cbailiss @Greg_Deckler , 

Does the personal gateway still not support UNC paths? 

Thanks

[Greg_Deckler]

I have not been able to get a UNC path to work personally. Been a while since I tried, but no dice. I *believe* that I was able to successfully map a drive to the network path and use that but I would have to double check.

[cbailiss]

Thanks for the reply.

It would be great if someone from the product team could comment on this (i.e. what is supported and what isn't).

At the moment I have seen nothing in the documentation that says whether this scenario is supported or not,

i.e.

Local Files = Supported

UNC Paths = ?

Mapped Network Drives = ?

Also, does the above vary by file type (e.g. under the covers, does the Gateway use the Access Database Engine to read Excel Files, which might mean the supported scenarios for Excel files differ to CSV/TXT files).

Thanks

Chris

Chris

[cbailiss · Accepted solution]

For the benefit of other people, I put this question to Microsoft and received the following answer:

"The Personal Gateway does not support network access, so UNC paths are not parsed (even if they refer to the local machine). The Enterprise Gateway may support this functionality in future releases. The current approach is to put required flat files in SharePoint Online or OneDrive"

Chris