topic Re: Report Visuals with Stale Data? in Service

Report Visuals with Stale Data?

Incipient — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 01:56:52 GMT

I have a report that updates daily in the morning, say 7am. At 9am the report - after it has refreshed - still has the previous day's data. Edit: only some visualisations are stale; some large tables are stale, some simple cards are up to date.

If I force another refresh, the visuals are still stale, if I refresh the page, or click the "Refresh Visuals" button in the top right, the visuals are still stale.

However if I download the report or create a new report and use the existing dataset as a "Power BI Dataset" source...then the original report visuals magically become no longer stale.

Has anyone encountered something like this?

Edit: I can't think of any nice images to explain what's happening...so please let me know if this description isn't clear.

Re: Report Visuals with Stale Data?

lbendlin — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 23:56:34 GMT

Reports don't update. Datasets update. If you have a report open while its underlying dataset updates (refreshes) then that change will not reflect in the report. You will have to reload the report (F5) to see the change.

Similarly, some browsers are trying to "help" and cache some of the information. This may also prevent some of your visuals to refresh.

Now, if you have closed and reopened your browser, and you still see that behavior - then that might be reason to worry. Can you be sure that the data has actually updated in your data source?

Re: Report Visuals with Stale Data?

Incipient — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 00:24:15 GMT

Haha yes, you got me on a technicality - I should have said the dataset, not the report.

I think this however is a timezone issue. Some of my logic I had accidently used LocalNow() instead of UtcNow(). I expect the PowerBI service uses UTC as it's refresh timezone? so when it was doing a daily refresh, "today" for us at 9am, is still "yesterday" for UTC.

I have fixed this and was going to monitor until tomorrow to sure this was the correct fix.

Thanks for the info/reply lbendlin 🙂

Re: Report Visuals with Stale Data?

lbendlin — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 01:19:03 GMT

Correct, the Power BI service runs on UTC. However, the dataset refresh schedule dialog allows you to specify a different timezone.

Re: Report Visuals with Stale Data?

Incipient — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 02:49:00 GMT

I've set the refresh schedule to be my timezone, but localNow() ignores the timezone, possibly because it's DateTime.localNow() rather than the DateTimeZone class? Definitely a 'gotcha' when using PowerBI - they have a timezone option that is easy to mess up!

I do feel like this is a bit in 'bug' territory. I would expect localNow() to use the refresh timezone I had set.