Now() for Last Refresh is now updating at all times and not during data refresh

[catwilkerson]

Hey! I'm new here but was hoping to have a question answered. Before Decemember Now() was being used to show when the Last Refresh for the data happened in Power BI. It's very simple:

Last Refresh = Now()

When the data refreshed this would update to say when that data refreshed happened. It's like in sql where you can show the current date with a function, but only when you hit the execute button, so it only shows when it was last executed. However, after December we have noticed that Now() datetime is always updating in our app. If someone refreshes the webpage it is showing the current date and time and counts up each second for each refresh for the time that they accessed the webpage. It's always updating, not just on data refresh.  Is there a setting we need to change to stop this behavior and have it go back to the previous behavior?

Thanks!

[AlexisOlson]

The DAX function NOW() is expected to change whenever it is called (although the value may be cached in some cases), not just at data refresh. So the current behavior is the intended behavior and I'm not sure what sort of caching was happening before.

@Kaviraj11's suggestion is good. Defining the timestamp as a table in the query editor works well since queries are only refreshed when the data is refreshed. Anything upstream from the query editor should also work.

[catwilkerson]

Will I need to worry about this behavior changing in the future? It just seems more stable to do this through SQL if how these things work change like this. Especially if there's no way to salvage this and will need to go across 100 reports to update all of these anyways.

[Kaviraj11]

No, you don't need to worry at all. 

You can give it a try and if it doesn't work, you can always use it through SQL. 

[Kaviraj11 · Accepted solution]

I would recommend you to create a new dataset with an expression 

 = DateTime.LocalNow()

Make sure to convert the dataset into a table and change the format accordingly. The datetime will only be changed after the dataset are refreshed.