Unable to connect to Power BI Desktop to PWA (oData)

[LoraBennett]

Hello

In a nutshell, when trying to refresh 3 different dashboards using the desktop app, all using an oData connection to PWA (project online), I'm receiving the error: Access to the Resource is Forbidden.

A bit of history regarding this:

The reports were provided to me by someone on our project team, he was running it manually, but the idea was to publish them to our Power BI Report Server. Because of this, we created a service account which would be used to make the oData connection and refresh the data.

This service account was given a Power BI Pro licence and a Project Online admin licence - may be over the top but we wanted to make sure the issues weren't account permission related.

I am able to open a web browser (as the service account), navigate to Project Online, open the report, authorise the account with my service account credentials and refresh the data. I've tested that, it worked.

However, when I open the report within Power BI Desktop (for report server), ensure the connections are set up to use my organization account (the service account) and then try and refresh I receive the error.  Access to the Resource is Forbidden. I've tried the different authentication types (basic, Windows as well as Organization) but no joy, I get the same error.

I would just ignore this, upload the reports to Power BI Report Server and connect there instead...in fact I did do that,  and I get errors connecting to the oData source as well.

Any help would be ideal as I've hit a dead end trying to get this to work.

[Icey]

Hi @LoraBennett ,

I find you have solved this problem in another post: oData Data Source Credentials issue. 

Congratulations.

Best Regards,

Icey

[LoraBennett · Accepted solution]

Not quite. This issue was regarding the desktop app whereas the other issue was regarding the PBIRS - which turns out, it just won't work. 

That said, I do believe the problem is regarding authentication. I'm logged onto my machine using my usual account and then logged into PBI desktop using the service account. When punching out to SPOL I'm telling it to use the service account credentials (which has access to POL) but it wouldn't surprise me if it's actually using my account (which doesn't have permissions to POL). Which results in the error.

So, whilst this issue is not fixed as I can't get my end goal of connecting a dashboard through PBI to POL I'll mark it as solved. For anyone interested, I'm working around this issue in a roundabout way by building an SSIS package to extract from POL, passing it to a database on a server and this connecting PBIRS to that connection for the report.  It's not ideal as you would have thought that Microsoft products should talk to each other...but go figure.

[Icey]

Hi @LoraBennett ,

Is this problem sloved?

If it is sloved, please always accept the replies making sense as solution to your question so that people who may have the same question can get the solution directly.

If not, please let me know.

Best Regards
Icey

[LoraBennett]

Hi @Icey 

Sorry, I passed your response to our Infrastructure team to get their throughts on whether this would be caused by ADFS; they originally said that as we're not getting the error elsewhere they didn't believe this would be the cause but I asked them to check regardless. I've not heard back from them yet as to if this was the fix so didn't want to mark as resolved just in case.

[Icey]

Hi @LoraBennett ,

Maybe you can refer to this post: OData credentials not working in Power BI Desktop; works fine in Excel.

It finds that forms authentication needs to be checked when signing in with ADFS.

Best Regards,
Icey

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.