Error in measure preventing refresh on Desktop not Service

[andyclap]

Has anything changed recently?

Previously errors in measures didn't cause problems with data loads.

It was OK to have measures that were "being worked on" and weren't even syntactically correct in a report - they get shown with an (i) next to them. They weren't being used anywhere, and so the report's data could be refreshed without problems.

Now on PBI desktop the data refresh fails on errors in measures. Further tables aren't loaded, instead showing "Load was cancelled by an error in loading a previous table."

However things still work on scheduled refresh on the service.

Anybody else noticed this? I can't seem to find a setting that might change behaviour on the desktop to be more sensitive.

[andyclap]

Thanks for your response.

If there is anyone from Microsoft here that knows of some official documentation or release notes about this breaking behaviour, a link would be good.

Measures have an indicator if they aren't correct, so we know before refresh. However the failure to refresh seems to happen at the point when the measures table is refreshed within the full sequence of tables, which in our case may be over an hour into the refresh. Naturally this is rather frustrating! 

Anyway we've removed any measures that are works in progress.

[v-yilong-msft]

Hi @andyclap ,

As I said earlier, this change is a subtle one. If you want to refer to the documentation for it, I think you can check out this one below: Troubleshoot refresh scenarios - Power BI | Microsoft Learn I hope it helps you.

Best Regards

Yilong Zhou

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[andyclap]

Hi Yilong.

Although it may be a subtle one, it causes breaking changes to users, so it should be called out in release notes.

The troubleshoot refresh scenarios page is not relevant to this discussion as it covers service refresh (which hasn't changed), rather than application side refresh.

[v-yilong-msft]

Hi @andyclap ,

From your description, it appears that Power BI Desktop has become stricter in terms of error handling, especially on syntactically incorrect metrics. The changes in this area are intended to ensure that data integrity and report reliability are up to date. While this is beneficial to the overall quality of the reports, I know it can be frustrating if you are used to different behavior.

As of right now there doesn't seem to be any way to refresh even if the DAX code is incorrect like it used to be, but this change will now also be the first time you know where the metric is incorrect, and if you change the metric in the first place, it will still still be possible to do a refresh.

Best Regards

Yilong Zhou

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[andyclap]

Thank you for confirming you understand my question.

It won't be the first time we know that a measure is wrong though - as there is a clear indicator when editing metrics, and the aforementioned (i) against the measure.

It's frustrating because our report takes over an hour to refresh locally, and only failed after a majority of data was loaded. We have several hundred tables and dozens of dedicated measure tables, so checking everything for errors is rather laborious. The (i) indicators are hidden when a table is collapsed too, fixing things meant expanding all tables and a lot of scrolling and careful checking.

But it's trivial enough to fix, and naturally we've stopped the practice of allowing work-in-progress measures.

My complaint would be that this change happened unanounced, and it caused several hours of work for me to find out why our users' reports were failing.

So I would still like a confirmation that this is indeed changed behviour.

I'll add feedback to the release notes page here too: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/desktop-latest-update?tabs=powerbi-desktop

[v-yilong-msft]

Hi @andyclap ,

I did look up the information for a long time, but there is really no official mention of the issue you mentioned in the update.

I'm sorry for the trouble, and I think your feedback in the relevant links mentioned is warranted, and hopefully you'll get a convincing official explanation there.

Best Regards

Yilong Zhou

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.