Gateway connection setting lost when republishing from Power BI Desktop

[astewart18]

I have a Power BI report that accesses a web page (anonymously), a spreadsheet stored on Ondrive for Business, and an in-house SQL server database through an Enterprise On Premises gateway.

When I publish a change to the pibx, the dataset is overwritten (there is no option to preserve it) and at the next scheduled refresh I get a failure message. I go into the Refresh settings, and find that the Gateway Connection option is not set to use a gateway. I have to reset this, select the gateway, and then edit the credentials for the datasource. Only then will a refresh occur successfully.

Until the next time I make a cosmetic change

What can I do to avoid losing this setting every time? I have tried to add the spreadsheet as a datasource on the Gateway, but it will only let me select between Anonymous or Windows, and I do not want to store a password.

[v-juanli-msft]

Hi @astewart18

I can reproduce your problem.

I create a report in Desktop with data sources of a web page(anonymously), an excel file stored on Ondrive for Business and an in-house SQL server database through an Enterprise On Premises gateway.

Then I face the same problem as you did.

However, when I don't add the file stored on Ondrive for Business as a datasource on the Gateway and select Anonymous. Instead I go to Schdule Refresh->Data source credential, create credential for it and select OAuth2 as the Authentication method.

And, I delete the  web page from desktop file, then republish the report to Service, it can refresh  without manually connecting to gateway and editing credentials.

Based on my test and research, I can explain why the problem happen. Since the data source contains any web source and its Authentication method is Anonymous, after republishing, the connection between web souce and gateway would be disconnect and needs to set manually.

Best Regatds

Maggie