Forum Discussion

Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
8 years ago

Problem with updating an existing visual

We are developing a custom visual and are having problems with deploying new versions. Here's what we are doing:   1. We have an existing visual, let's say that the version is 1.0.0. 2. We add som...
jppp's avatar
jppp
Continued Contributor
8 years ago

The uploaded code of all custom visuals are saved with the report and used by the report: so uploading a new version of your visual will overwrite the old version and a save will persist this version with the report.

This works for all custom visuals, but a little bit different for the official published custom visuals in the Office Store: those are downloaded from the Power BI CDN (Content Delivery Network) and used in the report. For speed and reliability these visuals are also cached locally, so it will take some time before a new version of a visual is being used by everyone.

 

So as long as you are not altering a published custom visual (or reuse the GUID), you could easily update a new version of a visual by uploading the pbiviz package and save the report. Reopening should use the new visual. There could be the case that the report is using the cached version and not the 'embedded' version. Clearing the browser/desktop cache will solve the problem directly.

 

 

And as best practise: keep the visual GUID always the same and make sure that your new visual can handle the change in functionality.

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable
    8 years ago

    We upload the new visual, save the report then reload the page.  After the reload the report uses the old visual again.

     

     

    Clearing the cache does not help. It seems like the problem is server side - maybe the visual is not correctly updated on the server since other reports still use the old visual? Or something along those lines.

     

    We do keep the GUID the same. I just mentioned changing the GUID because in some other topics (especially for the Desktop version of Power BI), users mentioned that changing the GUID does seem to solve the problem. We did try that and it indeed does solve the problem, but this is not really the solution since our end users would need to update the existing reports to use the new visual.

    • jppp's avatar
      jppp
      Continued Contributor
      8 years ago

      Strange that it is not working for you; I haven't seen that behavior.

       

      Looks to me like the save operation of the report is not finished correctly.

      Is it happening to all users? Maybe the javascript console provides some additional information.

      • Anonymous's avatar
        Anonymous
        Not applicable
        8 years ago

        We found out a bit more about this problem. Here are the steps to reproduce:

         

        1. Create a new visual that just displays the version number. So at the start our visual just displayed 1.0.0.

        2. Create a report, import the visual and add it to the report.

        3. Pin this visual to a dashboard. It seems that this is the step that causes the problems with updating. As long as the custom visual is pinned to any dashboards it cannot be updated.

        4. Create a new version of the visual displaying 1.0.1.

        5. Import the visual to the report and save it.

        6. Refresh and you will see the old 1.0.0 visual.

         

        It seems that the pinned visual somehow prevents the updating.

         

        You can now go to dashboards and delete the dashboard that has the visual and the visual on the report will now update and correctly show 1.0.1.