Relationship Display is not saving changes

[DQuigg]

Is the relationships display in Desktop supposed to save the current position.  In other words, if I drag the hierarchy the way that I want, isn't it supposed to save it?  I seem to get constant issues where I clean up the display only to come back in and it is all hosed up.  Sometimes it seems to save it properly.  What am I missing? I had the one below all nicely laid out and then come back in later and it is all messed up per below.

[kcantor]

Happened again today. Small model with 5 look up tables and a single fact table.  File size  is not overaly large. My currently used cache is 2.66 GB with 4096 set as maximum. Not sure if this is relevant. 

I saved this with the Collie layout and returned to find a data spider/ snowflake schema. Very frustrating. Had to delete 4 relationships that somehow formed between my look up tables.

[v-jiascu-msft]

Hi All,

I can't reproduce it. So I can't report anything. 

1. Please try to close these two options.

2. Please file support ticket here.

Note: Don't share any private info here.

Best Regards,

Dale

[dcresp]

Hi,

It seems to be a great pity that an issue that lots of people are getting is not even being reported. The issue is causing huge problems when using Power BI. Most of my pbix now have totally messed up diagrams and every time I put them back into place they break again.

It is going to be a hard issue to get much help on through a support ticket though as what we all agree on is that replicating or determining what breaks the data model is difficult to pin down. I realise that this also makes it hard for MS to look into but surely for an issue that numerous people are reporting for two months needs a little more effort to fix. 

Thank you for any help that you can provide with this issue.

Regards

David

[kcantor]

@dcresp is correct. I just finsished a 6 month go at fixing an issue where I knew the cause and MS finally listened. Now, a month later, the same issue is occuring and the process has to begin anew.

Having personal, long term assistance experience with PowerBI support tickets I can tell you that a support ticket is not the answer. they are going to want trace files and copies of data models which most of us have already said we can not share due to data privacy. In addition, they are going to want to know when it happens so they can repro it and well, it never happens the same way for me. If I could get the same data model to do it consistently, I would  encrypy my data and hand over a copy but I cannot get the same model to break every time. Some models it ignores completely and some of those ignored are the exact same models with the exact same queries and calculations as they are backups.

The situation is frustrating but I feel strongly that adding in the support team with a ticket will just frustrate me more.

[freder1ck]

I've been trying to reproduce this as well, because the arrangement of tables is not random. I typically put my dimensions at the top of the relationship view and my fact tables below (Collie schema). When this happens, it puts the fact tables in the middle and the dimension tables all around (classic star schema arrangement aka data spider). It's as if there is code to layout the tables in a specific default manner. Is there? If so, what is the use case for that code? If we knew the answers to these two questions, it could help us reproduce the issue. 

This behavior has been documented in the ideas area as well:

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/32423851-lock-placement-of-tables...

I feel that it is related somehow to the Power BI service. 

- I downloaded a pbix from the service to see what happened (it kept the arrangement it had been published with).

- I published the file without saving and when prompted to save, I clicked yes, save.

Neither of these steps reproduced the issue. 

Fred

[DQuigg]

I hate to say I have given up, but I have sort of worked around the problem.  It has happened multiple times in the past several weeks.  I have several common tables so if I just put those in the center of the diagram, I can live with the garbage everywhere else. I only have so much time to try to diagnose the problem. It does not seem to have a rhyme or reason.  

One thought I have - do you guys have a 4k monitor?  I know I have run into poor behaving apps with 4k so thought that might be a common thread.

[dcresp]

I have tried the workaround and can confirm that this does not work. The issues did seem to occur when I loaded new data into my pbix file though. For me, it is definitely not connected to the PBI Service as I have only been uploading the files to the pbix service not downloading them. I would be great if this issue could be addressed in a release of the PBI Desktop soon.

[freder1ck]

I do not have a 4k monitor, but I do use 2 24" HD monitors with my laptop. 

[freder1ck]

I have noticed that sometimes it happens when I open a second desktop file. 

[kcantor]

I may have found a new potential clue. It seems to only happen to files that I have not opened within the current week. If I am working regularly in a file, it does not happen. If I don't need that file for a while, it is hosed when I open it up.  Needless to say, it just happened. The current file had not been worked in for 14 days.