Importing a Theme can Corrupt the .pbix file

[gaccardo]

A word of caution when working with themes...  Make sure that you experiment with a copy of your .pbix file.  With a bit of copy/paste, I managed to include the following in my theme .json file.  After importing it, I could no longer create any visuals, edit/resize anything, or even click on visual elements without errors.  The solution was to rebuild the .pbix file from a previous version.

    "*": {
      "*": {
        "*": [{
            "fontColor": {
              "solid": {
                "color": "#000000"
              }
            },

            "background": [{
                "color": {
                  "solid": {
                    "color": "#333333"
                  }
                },
                "transparency": 0
              }
            ],
            "fontFamily": "Arial"
          }
        ]
      }
    },

[v-frfei-msft]

Hi @gaccardo,

Based on my test, I can reproduce your issuer here, and this issue is related to triple wildcard . It is recommended to update the theme file to be more specific with the visualStyles section, replacing one of the wildcards with a specific entity (visual type or formatting card name). Here I updates your code as below, then everything goes well.

"visualStyles":{
    "barChart": {
        "*": [{
            "background": [{
                "Color": {
                  "solid": {
                   "Color": "#333333"
                  }
                },
                "transparency": 0
              }
            ],
         "fontFamily": "Arial"
          }
        ]

We got response from PG:

As the Theme feature is in preview, and the triple wildcard is technically working as expected, there is no “fix” coming. We also identified a popular third-party Power BI Theme Generator website (non-Microsoft) and asked the owners to change their tool to avoid creating triple wildcards.

Regards,

Frank

[v-frfei-msft]

Hi @gaccardo,

Does that make sense? If so , kindly mark the answer as a solution to close the case, thanks in advance.

Regards,
Frank

[gaccardo]

The solution is for Microsoft to properly validate inputs.  If the theme file isn't valid, then the import should fail with an appropriate error message.