Some of my Relationships drop when I refresh...

[MaryF]

I really can't understand what I am doing wrong but when I create a simple many to one relationship between two tables, the relationship disapears when I refresh the data. Can anyone shed any light on this? Thanks

[PowerBIGuy]

Try going to File -> Options -> Data Load-> Relationships -> Uncheck "Update Relationships when refreshing queries"

[MaryF]

Thanks for the idea. I had a look and saw that I had it unchecked. So for completeness I checked it and tested that. No Joy

[PowerBIGuy]

have you tried unchecking the other options as well? "import relationship from data source" for example

[MaryF]

I am bumping this as it continues to occur. I have tried every version of setting within Data Load with no joy. 

In this instance I have 6 relationships, but when I refresh all data one relationship just disappears and I have to recreate it again??? 

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@MaryF Have you tried to replicate the same datasources and relationships in a seperate PBIX? Is there anything different in the datasources, column names... just throwing some ideas out.

[itchyeyeballs]

As @Seth_C_Bauer suggests, I've had some issues in the past with the auto links where the only solution was too recreate the pbix from scratch.

[MaryF · Accepted solution]

@Seth_C_Bauer& @itchyeyeballs

Thanks guys, I did as suggested and created a new PBIX with the main table and mapping table.
At first it still dropped the relationship but this time I happened to notice that the column for the many side of the join had some null values. So I created a new column that replaced these with an entry, changed the relationship to use this new column and now the relationship isn't dropping.
I've since added this method to the existing model and it works 🙂

Thanks again for your help

[itchyeyeballs]

Thats interesting, might be worth submitting a bug report (frown) to MS. PBI would pick that up if creating a link from scratch, may catch people out if its not checked when data is updated and link is silently dropped.