Personal bookmarks disappear when switching to Power BI Desktop projects (Premium)

[dpollozhani]

We recently upgraded to Power BI Premium. Finally, I thought, I can implement version control and deployment pipelines.

So I started creating Power BI Desktop projects (.pbip files with directories) of some of the existing .pbix files in one PBI workspace. Created a local git repo, added a remote to Azure DevOps, and synced the DEV workspace to this repo. All this works quite well.

I then tested everything and finally deployed to the PROD workspace, updating the app with the "new" content. What I didn't realize is that all personal bookmarks, which were based on the old .pbix files, now had disappeared. It is a known issue that there is no way to restore personal bookmarks upon deletion of a report, and let's hope this is something the PBI dev team fixes.

Now, the true reason for this problem is of course the fact that the service thinks that the dataset and report files coming from the PBI project, via DevOps, are different from the ones previously published as .pbix files - even though the content is identical. Supposedly due to a change in object ids (my guess).

Does anyone know if it is currently at all possible to convert existing .pbix files to a PBI project, while maintaining the integrity of the data and metadata of what is already published in a workspace (and therefore avoiding loss of bookmarks)?

[dpollozhani · Accepted solution]

I have found the solution to this problem.

Instead of, like I did, starting from the desktop, saving an existing .pbix as .pbip and then pushing this up to DevOps and then sync with the Dev workspace - start from the Dev workspace and sync this to the DevOps repo. Assuming of course that you have previously replicated the correct content from Prod/Test into Dev.

This way, the repo contains all dataset and report folders  - as would be seen when saving as .pbip, minus the .pbip shortocut itself - while preserving the object GUIDs! 

The final step is to clone the repo to your local machine and if needed change the name of the remote (which will be "origin" by default when cloning).

After this, CI/CD will work as intended, and you will not lose any of the personal bookmarks that users have saved in Prod.

[lbendlin]

Supposedly due to a change in object ids (my guess).

Spot on.

You cannot convert bookmarks across  GUIDs.  I don't think that will ever be possibble.

Note:  Personal bookmarks will also break if you as much as modify the meta data they depend upon.  For example if you decide to remove a column from your data model all the bookmarks that include said column will break.

[dpollozhani]

If the model changes to the degree where a bookmark cannot longer function, of course bookmarks cannot be expected to work. I can also accept that if a GUID changes, the service will see no relation between the two.

But it seems that migrating to Power BI Desktop project necessarily leads to a GUID change, even though nothin in the model/report changes content wise.

Can it really be that bad, that we simply need to accept the loss of all personal bookmarks if we want to do this?