Perspective in a Tabular Model recently broken for anyone else?

[mstayner]

I've been happily using PowerBI connected to a large tabular model with a few perspectives, and just noticed that the perspectives feature seems to be broken in PowerBI.  It definitely WAS working, but now it ain't.

Here's my situation; I have an on-premise tabular model in SSAS with ~5 perspectives.  If I connect to the model from Excel using PowerPivot and select a perspective, then only those objects in the perpective are available to me.  If however I use PowerBI and choose the same perspective, I see ALL the objects for the complete model.

Has anyone else seen this?  Or not?  I really need perspectives to work, because my model is so complex that end users need to see only their own area.

[deldersveld]

Perspectives are working fine for me on-premises (SSAS connector in Service is a different story). Assume you are using the latest version of PBI Desktop and have a live connection to the tabular model?

[mstayner]

I'm using the Web site, powerbi.microsoft.com, not the desktop version.

Actually I suspect that the engineers over at MS are fiddling with stuff, because at one point yesterday evening I was finding that all of the perspectives were showing the same set of the tables as one of  the more restrictive perspectives.  This morning, that problem is fixed, and I'm back to all the perspectives showing the same (complete) set of tables.

[deldersveld · Accepted solution]

I see. If you are using the SSAS connector with the powerbi.com Service, it is likely the same or a similar issue to what I have.

In my case, if I have a dataset using one perspective, and then setup a second connection using a different perspective, the initial dataset changes to reflect the second perspective. Further complicating things, we are using group workspaces where many groups have a perspective targeted toward them. When a dataset in one group "flips" to a different perspective, existing queries still appear to run properly, but attempting to browse and create a new report is a problem. Users can see parts of the model not targeted toward their group's perspective. We are employing row-level security in the tabular model though, so our workaround is simply to use the main model and avoid perspectives for the moment.

[mstayner]

Holy Unusable Feature Batman!

Well, that explains a lot, and MANY thanks for revealing that.

Now that I have your excellent analysis I can at least avoid/work around it.

[greggyb]

Just hopping on and saying that we see a similar issue as described in some posts above.

Using the web portal, we have a gateway to an on-prem SSAS Tabular instance. When adding a data source using this instance, we get the perspectives all listed separately to choose from. Whichever perspective we choose, we get a new data source added with that perspective's name. When browsing the perspective, regardless of which one was chosen, we observe only the tables exposed in the first defined perspective.

When connecting using Power BI Desktop, perspectives work as they should. When publishing the .pbix with the Tabular datasource, we see the appropriate behavior from the .pbix source in the browser.