Power BI community help needed, re: Salesforce objects connector

[anktaggrwl]

Hello Power BI community - if your company uses Salesforce, I'm coming to you all with a request.

We were using the objects connector in Power BI with tremendous success to build dashboards in qual and Prod environments in SF until it just stopped working on August 8th.

While we do have a support ticket open with Microsoft, and their support team thus far has pointed to credential issues on the SF side or proxy network issues on our company side as being the root cause, the network proxy and SF development teams continue to think it's a break in the Power BI software side, since this is the only third party software that we can't connect to SFDC from.

We first experienced issues on the July release and continued to see issues in the August and September releases. I should note it did work in the July release until it didn't.

On a similar post from a few days ago Microsoft said they were able to connect without issue, but our teams would like to note our issues aren't solely not being able to connect, because we can login to SFDC from PowerBI using SSO, but when it comes to actually loading objects or manipulating data in any way we receive an error that says "DataSource Error: The underlying connection was closed on a send."

Where I could use more data points to make a case for/against this being a Power BI issue:

Using the September release:
1) can you connect to Salesforce objects using the Salesforce objects connector?
2) can you perform a simple function such as splitting a column on a large object (>100k rows)
3) can you load that object to your data model?
4) if yes on #3, can you load more than one object thats been manipulated in query editor first?
5) if yes for any/all - do you use SSO to authenticate login to Salesforce or manually enter username/pw to connect to SF?
6) optional - your company name

As many datapoints as the community is able to provide would be greatly appreciated. We're all at a loss and still can't pinpoint the root.

Thanks much!

[QueryWhiz]

Hi @anktaggrwl were you able to find a solution? As a workaround, maybe you can try to test your connection with a 3rd party connector, which pulls data directly from the SF objects API. I've tried windsor.ai, supermetric and funnel.io. I stayed with windsor because it is much cheaper so just to let you know other options. In case you wonder, to make the connection first search for the Salesforce connector in the data sources list:

After that, just grant access to your Salesforce account using your credentials, then on preview and destination page you will see a preview of your Salesforce fields:

There just select the fields you need. It is also compatible with custom fields and custom objects, so you'll be able to export them through windsor.  Finally, just select PBI as your data destination and finally just copy and paste the url on PBI --> Get Data --> Web --> Paste the url

[v-yuezhe-msft]

@anktaggrwl,

I can connect to Salesforce using salesforce objects connector in the September release of Power BI Desktop, and I can perform a simple function and load more than one object to data model. And during the connection process, I enter username and password in the following screenshots.



In your scenario, does it work when you import limit data(e.g,100 rows) to Power BI Desktop? I would recommend you send a frown in Power BI Desktop.


Regards,
Lydia Zhang

[anktaggrwl · Accepted solution]

Thanks for confirming @v-yuezhe-msft.

Our teams were able to connect outside of our network and have found the errors to in fact be related to our proxy settings - hopefully we can have our proxy team implement a patch asap.

Thanks again!