Enable support for dynamic data sources in Power BI service

[AndyTrezise]

Unlike Power BI Desktop it appears that PBI Service doesn't yet support a refresh of datasets which are invoked using customer functions. We have numerous reports that link to data held in sharepoint lists...each list has a unique name (stored against each row of data) and which needs to be evaluated at the time of refresh. It works perfectly well in PBI Desktop but as soon as the report is published the functionality is lost. The error is: There was an error when processing the data in the dataset You can't schedule refresh for this dataset because one or more sources currently don't support refresh

[ramoten]

'+1 can't believe this has only 3 votes 😞

[powerbiconfig]

Yes Please. I want to dynamically map 6 SharePoint files. At present I have to use the SharePoint.Files connector and it takes over an hour to refresh. When I dynamically map the same files using parameters for Root, Path, File the hole report refreshes in about 1minute! It is insane that we can't rely on this technique in the Service!

[damien_baldy]

This functionality is extremely critical for long term flexibility and maintenance. It's hard to understand why Microsoft hasn't developed it for so long.

[josh_turnbull]

Developed a nice little generic solution to retrieve config information from an M table to pass into data source retrieval so that you only have to change one environment variable when deploying datasets to new environments, and then got screwed at the last stage when I came across this limitation. For anyone interested, I just needed this function:

= (environment as text, attribute as text) => 

let 

  configItem = Table.SelectRows(Config, (each [Environment] = environment and [Attribute] = attribute)),

  configValue = List.SingleOrDefault(configItem[AttributeValue])

in

  configValue

to read this table ('Config'):

= #table(

  type table

  [

    Environment=text,

    Attribute=text,

    AttributeValue=text

  ],

  {

    {"DEV", "ServerName", "[your dev server path]"},

    {"DEV", "DatabaseName", "[your dev database]"},

    {"TEST", "ServerName", "[your test server path]"},

etc...

  }

)

And that would have worked to parameterise every single report we have in the enterprise

[Q160401]

This is needed long ago.

[fbcideas_migusr]

Please vote to implement this crutial feature! Its absence greatly impairs the development of reports and dashboards.