Forum Discussion
When does a dashboard refresh?
Hello,
There are similar posts to this but no clear explanations or solutions that I've seen.
I'm evaluating PowerBI and have to say I'm liking what I see.
I’ve created a report contain a simple count of orders placed this week and I’ve pinned this to a dashboard. These are direct queries through the Enterprise gateway onto an on-premise SQL server. These work fine on the pc browser and on the iphone to start with.
When I enter a new order in the database and check the report it is refreshed straight away – awesome.
However the dashboard isn’t refreshed at the same time. On the dashboard I can drag the phone screen down and this perform a ‘sync’ but doesn’t update the data. I’ve added the standard ‘last refreshed’ date time to the dashboard and this shows the data is out of date. Sometimes by hours.
Occasionally the dashboard does refresh but I cannot understand why, or what has caused it.
The problem is, of course, this if the data on the dashboard and reports don’t match it’s a big problem for non-technical people, and frankly more technical, people to understand. I know I’m completely confused.
Other posts have suggested filtering issues – there are no filters here. The data is a simple SQL view containing one field, a count of orders.
I found the following page too
https://ideas.powerbi.com/knowledgebase/articles/732231-what-if-my-data-isn-t-up-to-date
Suggestions 1 and 2 aren’t relevant for my setup. Suggestion 3 doesn’t appear to be true, my tiles can be a lot more than 10 minutes out of date.
Can anyone explain what controls the dashboard refresh time/rate? Or where I might be going wrong.
Thanks for looking
Steve
Hi All,
Following your feedback on the Power BI community, we have improved the dashboard refresh functionality. You can now manually initiate a refresh to your tiles by opening the dashboard in the Power BI Mobile app for iOS and pulling down the top of the screen (see the animated image below).
When performing a manual refresh, we also trigger a tile refresh. Tile refreshes update the dashboard view, and retrieve the latest data in the underlying model. This means that you can be sure that your device’s screen is displaying the most recent tile data.
Please note that dashboards are updated automatically per dashboard owner configuration. Dashboards that are based on Direct Query connections have an automatic update about every fifteen minutes, so triggering a manual refresh will result in getting the latest data from the connected model.see Video in the release blog:
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-mobile-apps-feature-summary-august-2016/
Hello again,
As the person who originally raised this discussion I thought I should return and report my findings.
From my testing I confirm that dashboards and reports collecting data via direct query are working great. The dashboards are syncing to the live, on premise data, when you 'pull down' the screen on the iPhone.Thanks to all who commented to confirm I wasn't going crazy and those who fixed/improved the Power BI product.
31 Replies
Hi All,
Following your feedback on the Power BI community, we have improved the dashboard refresh functionality. You can now manually initiate a refresh to your tiles by opening the dashboard in the Power BI Mobile app for iOS and pulling down the top of the screen (see the animated image below).
When performing a manual refresh, we also trigger a tile refresh. Tile refreshes update the dashboard view, and retrieve the latest data in the underlying model. This means that you can be sure that your device’s screen is displaying the most recent tile data.
Please note that dashboards are updated automatically per dashboard owner configuration. Dashboards that are based on Direct Query connections have an automatic update about every fifteen minutes, so triggering a manual refresh will result in getting the latest data from the connected model.see Video in the release blog:
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-mobile-apps-feature-summary-august-2016/
Hello again,
As the person who originally raised this discussion I thought I should return and report my findings.
From my testing I confirm that dashboards and reports collecting data via direct query are working great. The dashboards are syncing to the live, on premise data, when you 'pull down' the screen on the iPhone.Thanks to all who commented to confirm I wasn't going crazy and those who fixed/improved the Power BI product.
Bump - surely someone understands what controls this? Or at least suffers the same issue. This is a block to us using and promoting Power BI to others. Please help if you can.
We have made a solution that uses the free account type. The dashboard is updated daily via manual publish from Power BI Desktop. The webpage updates with the new data, but the iOS app does not. It requires the person to logout and then login again to update. Very annoying. Using the latest version of iOS app. Please note that it is the Reports the user looks at. Even when changing the layout a bit the report shows with the changed view, but data is still old. Must be some error in data updates in the app. I am using the latest iOS version updated 27th of april (same error in previous versions). Makes the dashboards quite useless. iOS is 9.3.1 (32 bit)
This is not the same issue.
I'm using Direct Query to attemt to pull data from the on premise data source. You are doing a manual publish from the Power BI Desktop.I am experiencing the same issue - our mobile reporting dashboard data is not refreshing on our iphones.
However, if I use the same URL to connect to the dashboards, then the data is refreshed-
Not sure if this is the correct forum since we are using the "SQL Server Reporting Services" section of the Power BI Mobile application?
Hi team_steve,
Dashboard tiles that are based on direct query should be refreshed automatically every 15 minutes (or more if it was explicitly defined by the data-set owner when the connection was created). On the web, user can click on the elipsis and then manually refresh the tiles to save the 15 minutes waiting.
Recently we had high severity issue with tiles freshness but this was resolved already.
Can you please tell if you still don’t see up to date dashboard tiles 15 minutes or so after that the data was updated in the DB? Please check it both on the web and on the mobile (separately) if you can.
If you dont see up to date data please update the thread here and also open support ticket as this is not the expected
behavior (support.powerbi.com) .
Hi yaronc,
Thanks for your reply. I understand what you are saying about a 15 minute refresh but I thought that with a Direct Query the data connection is refreshed on demand. Therefore the dataset owner (me) has no control over the refresh timing.
My dashboard tiles when accessed from my iPhone are not updated every 15 minutes.
When I make a change to the data source (an on-premise SQL database), the mobile report updates within a minute or so, but the dashboard can take a couple of hours.
I slide down the mobile screen to refresh the data, it says it is synching, then that it is up to date. But it's not!
If I use the 'Refresh Dashboard Tiles' option from the Power BI Web App on the laptop everything works fine and the data is refresh immedietly. - Doing this also seems to force the mobile dashboard to update.
I'm really confused about how and when mobile dashboard tiles should update. Do you have any info?Hi team_steve
We are planning to add the manual refresh for direct query based dashboards on mobile apps so you will have the capability to manually refresh the Direct Query based dashboard. We are also fixing bugs related to auto refresh time (Bugs fixes should be in Production in 3 weeks from now).
I will update you when we can commit on ETA for the Direct Query manual refresh.
Thanks,
Yaron
Hello yaronc , you wrote that "On the web, user can click on the elipsis and then manually refresh the tiles to save the 15 minutes waiting." I can not find any elipsis or something where i can manually refresh the tiles..also are you talking about a dashboard or a report? Can you please help me? :)
Thanks
This chrome extension did trick for us.
https://spgaurav.blogspot.com/2019/04/chrome-plugin-to-auto-refresh-power-bi.html
Note : This wont work with full sceen
