Custom Visualization goes "Blank" after Resize

[WZorn]

I'm expriencing a strange behavior while trying to develop a custom visual.

The visualization goes blank after resizing the visualization.  Has anyone else experienced this and know the cause?

I've reverted to the default template created during "pbiviz new" and see the same behavior.  It looks like the div id="sandbox-host" is completely wiped.

As you can see here, updates WORK.  This adding and removing a field that increased the encounter count.

Here is a screen grab of the DOM for the iframe of this visualization:

Now, after a resize:

And the DOM now:

[Anonymous]

Hello @WZorn 

Sorry for bothering, this is off-topic. I wanted to ask you whether you can help me regarding this question.

[dm-p · Accepted solution]

This seems to be a transient issue that's been happening for me as well. It's working at the moment in my tenant, but has been sporadic over the last few days and cost me a lot of wasted time in debugging. Suggestion would be to create an issue in the tools repo to see if there's anything the team are doing any maintenance on the developer visual in the Service. They don't frequent the forums, unfortunately 😞

Daniel

[WZorn]

As it turns out.... it randomly started working again yesterday.

No replys from anyone on the github, so no idea why.  Back to work though!

[WZorn]

I'm not seeing anything intermittent about this.  It's always doing the same thing.  

A have a little bit of a clarification.  The visual goes "blank" on mouse-up.  If I click and drag the frame to resize the visual, the update count increases as expected.  As soon as I release the button it goes blank.

Any ideas on how to debug this?   I've posted on the tools repo, but no response there.

[dm-p]

It was intermittent for me in the sense that it was doing this, and now it's not (in my tenant) - and has been 'stable' for around 4 days or so now. I did a presentation the other day on creating visuals where it worked the whole time, but the day before, I was having these exact problems.

The behaviour I experienced was indeed the same as you, i.e. resize, mouse up and then it looked like the visual host attempted to run the constructor agaion rather than the update method.... but just blanked out. Since the issue has gone away, the seems to wotk very much the same, i.e. update method fires as normal.

So... for me it seems to be okay, but I'm not sure why it resolved itself. I'm not sure what else you can do in terms of debugging as it looks like an issue external to our code in the sense that the developer visual host is causing the problem.

If you've raised an issue and had no response the only other thing I can think of is to email pbicvsupport@micsrosoft.com and link the issue in this correspondence. It may spur the team to look at it. I will see if I can escalate awareness of this issue through a different channel, but it might take a couple of days for me to hear anything (if I do).

[WZorn]

@dm-p , thank you for your response.

I'll send an email tomorrow and see if I can get some more attention to the post.

Two things I'm noticing that may or may not be related:

1.  I've noticed that when I add the developer visual in PBI Online, I get two warnings in the console:

DevTools failed to load SourceMap: Could not parse content for https://app.powerbi.com/groups/me/reports/03c1da23-94b2-4ba0-80b2-f1f2f616be9b/visual.js.map: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 2

DevTools failed to load SourceMap: Could not parse content for https://app.powerbi.com/groups/me/reports/03c1da23-94b2-4ba0-80b2-f1f2f616be9b/visual.css.map: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 2

2.  When running pbiviz start, the output shows "error", but no details and it progresses on.  I think this may be since I started using "powerbi-visuals-api": "~3.8.2".  You can see in below just after the "found 0 vulnerabilities" line.

Here's what I see:

\defaultNew> pbiviz start
info Installing API: ~3.8.2...
info
up to date, audited 147 packages in 2s

4 packages are looking for funding
run `npm fund` for details

found 0 vulnerabilities

error

info Starting server...
info Start preparing plugin template
i ｢wds｣: Project is running at https://localhost:8080/webpack-dev-server/
i ｢wds｣: webpack output is served from /assets
i ｢wds｣: Content not from webpack is served from \defaultNew\.tmp\drop
info Finish preparing plugin template
(node:13264) [DEP_WEBPACK_DEPRECATION_ARRAY_TO_SET] DeprecationWarning: Compilation.modules was changed from Array to Set (using Array method 'reduce' is deprecated)
(Use `node --trace-deprecation ...` to show where the warning was created)
(node:13264) [DEP_WEBPACK_MODULE_ERRORS] DeprecationWarning: Module.errors was removed (use getErrors instead)
(node:13264) [DEP_WEBPACK_COMPILATION_ASSETS] DeprecationWarning: Compilation.assets will be frozen in future, all modifications are deprecated.
BREAKING CHANGE: No more changes should happen to Compilation.assets after sealing the Compilation.
Do changes to assets earlier, e. g. in Compilation.hooks.processAssets.
Make sure to select an appropriate stage from Compilation.PROCESS_ASSETS_STAGE_*.
info Start packaging...
info Finish packaging
Webpack Bundle Analyzer saved report to \defaultNew\webpack.statistics.dev.html

DONE Compiled successfully in 4678ms 3:07:15 PM
i ｢wdm｣: assets by path ../build/ 1.91 KiB
asset ..\build\src\visual.d.ts 1.22 KiB [emitted]
asset ..\build\src\settings.d.ts 432 bytes [emitted]
asset ..\build\.tmp\precompile\visualPlugin.d.ts 271 bytes [emitted]
assets by chunk 419 KiB (name: visual.js)
asset visual.js 419 KiB [emitted] (name: visual.js) 1 related asset
asset visual.css 132 bytes [emitted] (name: visual.js) 1 related asset
asset pbiviz.json 435 KiB [emitted]
asset status 62 bytes [emitted]
Entrypoint visual.js 419 KiB (464 KiB) = visual.css 132 bytes visual.js 419 KiB 2 auxiliary assets
orphan modules 7.33 KiB [orphan] 6 modules
runtime modules 1.13 KiB 5 modules
modules by path ./node_modules/core-js/modules/*.js 189 KiB 182 modules
modules by path ./node_modules/core-js/internals/*.js 133 KiB 145 modules
modules by path ./node_modules/powerbi-visuals-utils-dataviewutils/lib/*.js 5.53 KiB
./node_modules/powerbi-visuals-utils-dataviewutils/lib/dataViewObjectsParser.js 3.54 KiB [built] [code generated]
./node_modules/powerbi-visuals-utils-dataviewutils/lib/dataViewObjects.js 1.46 KiB [built] [code generated]
./node_modules/powerbi-visuals-utils-dataviewutils/lib/dataViewObject.js 543 bytes [built] [code generated]
modules by path ./src/*.ts 16.1 KiB
./src/visual.ts 11.6 KiB [built] [code generated]
./src/settings.ts 4.43 KiB [built] [code generated]
./.tmp/precompile/visualPlugin.ts 1.01 KiB [built] [code generated]
external "Function('return this')()" 42 bytes [built] [code generated]
css ../../../../AppData/Roaming/npm/node_modules/powerbi-visuals-tools/node_modules/css-loader/dist/cjs.js!../../../../AppData/Roaming/npm/node_modules/powerbi-visuals-tools/node_modules/less-loader/dist/cjs.js??ruleSet[1].rules[2].use[2]!./style/visual.less 93 bytes [built] [code generated]
webpack 5.43.0 compiled successfully in 4678 ms
i ｢wdm｣: Compiled successfully.

[WZorn]

I tried again this morning.  Still seeing the same problem.  If I could see this intermittent behavior, I'd feel a little better.

I made a post on the tools repo as you suggested.

[WZorn]

Seriously?  I'm right there with you on wasted time.  I've been commenting out and removing modules thinking that something I added either isn't compatible or broke the visual.

*sigh*  I need a notification email or site to check for issues before I drive myself crazy.