Automatic refreshes never pull in changes (UPDATED)

Thanks for your reply!

I'm a bit unclear on what you mean by your first sentence.  What makes "little sense"?

We can't use DQ for the today partition for a couple of reasons.  The incremental period  for most of the tables in our model is five days, not just one ('today").  Also, we make extensive use of DAX functions in the model that are not available in DQ mode.  It would require an extensive refactoring of the model to shift it to a hybrid model from import only.  

I would prefer not to have to use Full, also for a couple of reasons.  One, it is brute force, and refreshes data whether it is needed or not.  Doing a Full refresh of all tables in the model might take longer on each pass than just running a schedueld incremental every 30 minutes, defeating the purpose.  And to Full refresh only the partitions that have changed would be pretty burdensome, as I think, we'd have to essentially code the polling that the refresh already does to know which ones have changed.

From some more reading, I think the crux of the issue is that Automatic only does something if the partition is in a state other than Ready.  All the partitions I am expecting to see changes in are just sitting there in Ready.  I have no idea what makes a partition not Ready.

UPDATE: Perhaps part of my misunderstanding here is with how Full works.  With Full on a specific partition, which is typically what I will do manually, I think it just refreshes the partition regardless of whether there are changes.  Or if it doesn't, I never catch it doing the analysis step. But with Full on a table, I can see it doing the analysis step on each partition in the update window.  So yes, perhaps Full is what I need to be doing in my code.  I will change to that and test it.