I would like to propose an enhancement to the way query refresh behavior is handled in Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service.
Currently, when developing reports, it is often necessary to disable query loads or exclude certain tables from refresh in order to keep development iterations fast and efficient. However, this creates a challenge when publishing to the Service:
Queries that were disabled or excluded during development remain in that state after publishing.
This means additional manual steps are required to re-enable them, and forgetting to do so can cause incomplete datasets in production.
Proposed Enhancement:
Introduce an option that allows developers to set different refresh/load behaviors for development vs. production environments. For example:
A toggle to “Disable load only in development” (but always load in Service).
Or a parameter-driven mechanism where refresh rules can be automatically adjusted based on environment.
Alternatively, extend the existing “Include in report refresh” checkbox to have two modes:
Development only (faster iteration)
Publish/Service only (full data load)
Benefits:
Faster development cycles without compromising the integrity of published datasets.
Reduced risk of accidental omissions when publishing reports.
Cleaner handover between development, testing, and production environments.
This improvement would provide developers with flexibility, while ensuring that end-users and business stakeholders always receive complete and accurate data when the reports are published.
Thank you for considering this suggestion. I believe it would make Power BI development workflows both safer and more efficient.
