Scheduled Refresh at Power BI Service and its impact for Desktop

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I have a doubt regarding my scheduled refresh of dataset at Power BI Service and refresh of data in Power BI Desktop.

I have scheduled a refresh of my dataset at Power BI Service (JIRA API datasource) which is working correctly. Now when I open my Power BI Desktop pbix file (after the scheduled PBI service refresh), the pbix file still points to the old data. Hence I need to always refresh data in PBI Desktop manually, even after the scheduled refresh of PBI service dataset. Shouldn't the PBI Service refresh also update the PBI desktop dataset? If I am not wrong, shouldn't they use the same dataset? Asm I wrong in underastanding these things somewhere. Please advise. 🙂 

Thanks.

Regards,

Anuj

[DeanWHall]

Hi,

There are different parts to the delivery model in Power BI, some are joined up and others are, by design, seperate.

Walking through your process - you have a Dataset in PBI Service, which is connected to Jira as a source.  That schedule is working correctly and updates as you would expect. 

You have a pbix report that you are opening in Desktop and it has old data in it.  This is also correct behaviuor.

Your desktop report, is in the designer tool (Power BI Desktop) and by definition functions as a stand alone instance of your report from the service.  You can connect and refresh the data (manually), but as it is essentially a development tool, you would not want to automatically pull in fresh data.

The solution to your need is to publish your report into the service in an appropriate workspace.  Once published and in the workspace the report will use the same dataset that is being updated via your schedule as there is only the one dataset in the service for each report.

So in summary; Desktop is a design tool and you have full control over updates and published reports use any sceduled dataset they are built from in the service.

Regards,

Dean

[Anonymous]

Thanks @DeanWHall , That makes sense. So is there any way my Desktop report can use the same dataset(which gets updated by scheduled refresh), every time I open it? Or would I need to refresh it manually each time?

Please excuse if my question is way too silly. 🙂
Regards,

Anuj

[DeanWHall · Accepted solution]

Anuj - nothing is way to silly !

And in answer to your quesiton - opening in Desktop will always need a manual refresh - you can't set a 'refresh on load' in the way you can on an Excel sheet.

[Anonymous]

Thanks @dean . I read somewhere that the only workaround to do this would be to create a report only for dataset, and then another report referencing this dataset? 

Anyways I got the answer for my question, would think about the alternative methods. 🙂

Regards,

Anuj