Changing Power BI service datasets in a report

[seabrew]

I switched over to using a shared Power BI dataset for my firms reports. This works great and is really nice to have a central place for all my DAX code, and for consistent measure formatting across reports. 

It appears that you cannot change a pbix reports connection once you tie it to a Power BI dataset based on the comments in this blog post: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/connecting-to-datasets-in-the-power-bi-service-from-desktop...

Our BI reports are now in production and I want to create a test environment using a UAT sharted Power BI data model for my existing reports. Sirui Sun mentioned to someone asking about this limitation: "Hey Lee - yes, the capability above is on our backlog - it is a crucial piece of our ALM vision."

Until this feature is avilable, does anyone know a way of hacking the PBIX file to point to the UAT Power BI dataset manually? 

[v-sihou-msft]

@seabrew

No, you can't directly edit the .pbix hosted on Power BI Service. You can only download a .pbix copy from your workspace for UAT to on-premise machine. Then edit it and republish it onto UAT.

Regards,

[seabrew]

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@Simon_Hou-MSFT wrote:

@seabrew

No, you can't directly edit the .pbix hosted on Power BI Service. You can only download a .pbix copy from your workspace for UAT to on-premise machine. Then edit it and republish it onto UAT.

Regards,

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Sorry, I am not following. I have the .pbix file stored locally and do all my work in Power BI Desktop. I don't see any open to change the data source once the pbix file is first connected to a power bi service dataset.

[seabrew · Accepted solution]

Changing Power BI service datasets has been added as a new feature in the August 2017 updates!

You can now change the data source in Power BI desktop by clicking Edit Queries -> Data Source Settings under the External Data tab.