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maracles
Resolver II
Resolver II

Power BI.com manual refresh breaking visuals

Over the last week a number of visuals on PowerBI.com have stopped working whenever a scheudled refresh or 'refresh now' is invoked. 

To be clear immediately after publishing my PBX file they work with no issue across all reports and dashboards. They also work without issue in Power Bi Desktop. After trying to refresh however it breaks the visuals and they give a generic message saying 

Couldn't retrieve the data for this visual. Please try again later.
Please try again later or contact support. If you contact support, please provide these details.

I have an open support request with Microsoft but they are quite slow to respond. Thinks I've noted:

- There appears to be no pattern with which visuals break, it is different types of visualisation
- There appears to be no shared measures across all the broken visuals 
- There appears to be no common table or dataset across the broken visuals

I cannot therefore identify a pattern that might cause the break.

Can anyone recommend ways of troubleshooting this? Microsft has suggested striping down my entire workbook down to just the measures I need however this is a huge amount of work. If there is an interim stage that would be helpful .

I just can't understand why it works on Desktop, loads on publication and then breaks on refresh. Does PowerBI.com refresh using a different process? 

We are using Personal Gateway. 

Thanks. 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Ok, so after more than 3 hours on the phone with a very helpful Microsoft support member yesterday we managed to narrow this down.

The issue was being caused by data coming from one (or multiple) columns being imported from our MySQL database. The columns in MySQL are stored as datetime and originally I imported them directly and then set the column type in BI to date/time. This was working for a number of months until it stopped working as described above.

The solution here was to, in the SQL query, use CONVERT([column_name], CHAR) to convert the datetime value into a text string, import into PowerBI and THEN convert to date/time in Power BI.

The technician couldn't explain why this fixed things as he should direct import from datetime columns should work fine. They are trying to get me more info and I will update if they do. 

Just posting in case useful for other people. 

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3 REPLIES 3
ankitpatira
Community Champion
Community Champion

@maracles Maybe it is something to do with the gateway or data refresh and data is not getting returned back to service which is causing visual to fail. To troubleshoot I would suggest,

 

1. Start importing less number of columns and filtering out data so that only small amount of data is required. Then publish and refresh. This will help figure out if the problem is with data being returned or not to the service. Also each time import fields that are different from previous test to see if the problem is with certain fields or not.

 

My feeling is that since you're using personal gateway maybe certain type of column and data within is causing it to fail. I am not 100% sure but i think i've seen before where someone complained about specific type of column with personal gateway.

 

Anyways doing above will atleast give you some insight and maybe even solve the problem. I would also suggest you publish with using data gateway instead of personal gateway.

THanks @ankitpatira. The same visuals used to work previously with no changes having been made to the visuals, underlying measures or table data formats.  I am currently doing as you suggested and stripping out everything in the model to narrow down things. 

I'm currently down to 2 tables and we'll see how it goes.

We're currently testing  On-premises gateway.

Ok, so after more than 3 hours on the phone with a very helpful Microsoft support member yesterday we managed to narrow this down.

The issue was being caused by data coming from one (or multiple) columns being imported from our MySQL database. The columns in MySQL are stored as datetime and originally I imported them directly and then set the column type in BI to date/time. This was working for a number of months until it stopped working as described above.

The solution here was to, in the SQL query, use CONVERT([column_name], CHAR) to convert the datetime value into a text string, import into PowerBI and THEN convert to date/time in Power BI.

The technician couldn't explain why this fixed things as he should direct import from datetime columns should work fine. They are trying to get me more info and I will update if they do. 

Just posting in case useful for other people. 

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