Power BI Online Missing Column Error

[jimmyhaley]

Hi Guys,

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but this seems like a bug that I've run into before.  Previously, the only way to resolve it was to trash the entire dataset and re-upload, but even that's not working here.  I feel like I must be overlooking something, but this behavior is different from the other datasets I've uploaded.

Basically, I've built a dashboard in PBID that has a column called "Stop Time" in it...the dashboard works in the Desktop app, both the queries and the actual visuals refresh fine.   I upload to powerbi.com and everything works there in terms of the visualizations, I can also look at the available columns and I have all of them there (including "Stop Time" mentioned above).

Try to schedule a refresh and that's when I get stuck...I get an error that the column "Stop Time" does not exist.  Again, I've tried everything to get this to work - I've created a dashboard from within powerbi.com using the exact column that the refresh claims doesn't exist, I've trashed the dataset and re-uploaded everything, etc.  Nothing works that I've found yet.  This is a local CSV file refreshing through Power BI Personal Gateway that works for about 8 other files on my machine, so there's no difference there.

Any ideas?

[Youssef]

Thanks for reporting this issue. I'll create a ticket for the team to investigate. One quick question though, if you click refresh in the Power BI Desktop, does that refresh work fine? Is it only the refresh from the PowerBI.com service through the gateway that fails?

[jimmyhaley]

Additional data on this: I attempted to rename the pbix file to see if it would force PBI to replace any "cached" data on the pbi server itself - that didn't work.  However, more odd behavior occurred when I tried to publish the visuals directly from within Designer - it published successfully, but if I tried to schedule a refresh from within pbi.com, I received a different error that the dataset did not support scheduled refreshing...please note that nothing changed in my dataset that DID allow scheduled refreshing previously.  Also of note, there is only one query in this file for refresh and it's a local CSV file located on the machine where the personal gateway is installed, so there's not reason that error should be occurring.

[jimmyhaley]

Also of note, when I upload the dataset from within pbi.com, the dataset IS available for refresh...basically, I'm using the exact same dataset uploaded two different ways (one from within the Desktop application, one via the pbi web interface) and getting two different responses.

Just for shiggles, though - I opened the csv source file for the query and re-saved it in excel...This appears to have corrected the problem for now since it saved as a windows CSV instead of a text-based CSV format.

The formatting for the original file was "column1","column2","column3" "data1","data2","data3" with the "Stop Time" column being the last column.  Apparently Power BI sees this and can "absorb" it during the query process, but something with the online PowerBI engine does not like that format and it cleaves off the last column due to the lack of comma differentiating the column row from the first data row...that's what I'm guessing.