Problem publishing template from Desktop to Power BI Online

[wrm-itstaff]

Hello Power BI Folks,

We have a publishing problem that has just started.

BACKGROUND:  We use desktop to create and maintain a template that is published to Power BI online.  The template is linked to a data source that gets updates daily through a gateway.  We would do periodic updates and re-publish the template to Power BI online with no issues.  Note that the July 2017 Desktop update has been installed.

INFO:  We open desktop, load the template, data from the premise database is loaded into the desktop without issue.  Changes are made, new reports created, and the updated template is saved.  NOTE during this process, desktop still shows "Untitled - Power BI Desktop" at the top of the desktop window.

ISSUE:  Attempt to Publish.  Desktop asks to "save" again.  We save as template again and the desktop still shows "Untitled".  An error appears that says: 

     Publishing to Power BI.  An error occured while attempting to publish ": Path cannot be null. 

     Parameter name: path

We are unable to publish the updated template.

We have chosen to save and publish templates in order to reduce the size of the file as our SQL data is fairly large.  This process has worked well for the past few months, but something has just changed.

Thanks for your help.

[JimmyCeron_PBI1]

Any updates about being able to publish a .pbit file to service?

Thanks

[v-sihou-msft · Accepted solution]

@wrm-itstaff

You can't publish a .pbit file. What you have published should be .pbix file. Once you open a .pbit file and retrieve the data properly, you must save it into .pbix for use. That's the reason why it always show "Untitiled". If you directly publish a .pbit file, it will show this error:

Publishing to Power BI.  An error occured while attempting to publish ": Path cannot be null. 

Parameter name: path

Regards,

[wrm-itstaff]

Thanks for your reply.  I understand what you are saying.  What prompted the question is that the behavior of publishing from Desktop appears to have changed with the July update.  This particular content pack is configured to receive daily updates through a premise gateway so there is no need to actually include the data while publishing.  We saved the .pbix and published and it worked.

QUESTION:  Since we use a gateway to update the database online, should we change how we handle the content pack in Desktop?  The current .pbit file is 78 K while the .pbix file is 87 MEG.  The data file grows on a daily basis.  Should we change the content pack to do a query instead of loading all the data?

Thanks again for your help.

[wrm-itstaff]

This appears to be another case of MS fixing an unintended feature.  We have been publishing the templates until the July Power BI update.  If templates were not allowed to be published, there was a bug prior to the July release that allowed them to be published.  For analysis packs that link to a large online database it seems that it would be preferable to allow the uploading of the template instead of requiring it to include the data.

QUESTION:  Is there an alternate method that should be used when publishing to Power BI Online?

Thanks for your help.