Enterprise gateway & scheduled refresh

[joerykeizer]

Hi guys,

I had the enterprise gateway setup and it was working well.

Yesterday I republished a pbix file because I added an Excel source (also to the gateway configuration of course) and now I can't select the enterprise gateway on the scheduled refresh page.

To investigate the problem I also created two test files, one with 1 excel file and another with data from an sql source. The gateway can be selected on the sql source but not the excel source. The weird thing is that I have another older dataset, very similar to the one I'm now having problems with, which includes the same excel from the testfile, where I can still select the enterprise gateway.

Any ideas on what is causing this problem?

[ankitpatira]

@joerykeizer How have you connected to your excel file in the problem report? If it was using DirectQuery from power bi desktop then enterprise gateway don't support that. If you have done import and are doing schedule / manual refresh there shouldn't be an issue.

[joerykeizer]

Thank you for your reply. I have just done 'import' so I agree, there shouldn't be an issue. I'll try reinstalling the gateway because this just doesn't make any sense.

[joerykeizer · Accepted solution]

Fixed it.

When setting up the gateway; the file path for the Excel needs to start with a "server prefix". When I imported the new file into PowerBI desktop the location just started with S:\. It didn't match the path I set up in the gateway even though it was the same file. 

[nathanh]

@joerykeizer I'm having the same problem with an excel file. I have set the path on my local machine and on the gatway server to be the same i.e. C:\Folder\File.xlsx but after I publish to Power BI web I can't run a refresh from that gateway. What is a server prefix and how did you use it to solve your problem? I'd really appreciate your help!

[joerykeizer]

@nathanh Hi! My problem occurred because the Excel file was on a network location. Not sure if yours is too? If not then the following probably won't be useful. My situation was:

When I added the excel as a source in PowerBI the path looked normal in the query editor (S:\Folder\File.xlsx). For the Enterprise Gateway I needed to add the specific server path I think (I'm not an IT guy). The full path including "prefix" would look like \\XX-xxx000\Data$\Sales\Folder\File.xlsx.

Because I forgot this, the exact path in PowerBI was different from the one in the query editor and scheduled refresh wasn't possible. As soon as I changed it it was fine. Other than that I don't really know. Are the path's really identical? .xlsx vs .xls maybe?