Datasets versus Excel

[Anonymous]

Looking for some expert guidance here.  

I have built about 10 Power Bi reports for our company...all of them connect to 3 different Excel files that live in SharePoint.   I export the tables out of our horrible ERP system (no, it's not a well-known system and it has no APIs for a direct connection), and save these as Excel files in SharePoint.     I connect these via my data model in the desktop.  

This is not automated at all  (from ERP to Excel).    But the refresh from Power Bi service to the Excel files is set up for refresh.   This all works fine. 

Our system admin, who apparently can't listen, was tasked with assigning outside developers to automate this extraction.   What he ended up doing, was just extracting to datasets.    Well, I can't connect multiple data sets to Power Bi desktop (or the web service).  

I've waited weeks for this to get done...and today I find out he's done this...which is not at all what I asked for.   

Sorry for the rant...but I guess my question is...is there any way to make this work?    We do have access to Premium workspaces and I have a Pro license.  

[Greg_Deckler]

Huh, so someone built some kind of custom integration or something to extract the information out of the ERP straight into datasets in Power BI? And so now all you have in Power BI are datasets which, of course, you can only connect to one at a time via Live connection, right?

I have to believe that if they created these datasets, they did so via Power BI Desktop so perhaps the answer is to get your hands on those PBIX files. Otherwise, if you have Premium, perhaps you could connect a dataflow and use linked entities, wait, no that won't work, dataflow can't go against a Power BI dataset.

I have to believe that somewhere some Power BI Desktop PBIX files exist that created those datasets. Otherwise, I would be interested to know how they created those datasets.

[Anonymous]

Hi Greg  -   So in the end, what is was is that oursysadmin and the developers had mistakenly thought that I could connect my data model (in my desktop) to multiple data sets.  

After I showed them this was not possible, what did actually work was using the Get Data (Web) feature, and connected to what I believe was a json query using various query strings, and that did indeed work.     If I'm not mistaken, the query strings were connecting to tables in the ERP database itself