Data refresh disabled gateway needed - did not need one before...

Hi Anonymous 

Yes, using the standard web connector in Power BI/Power Query requires a Gateway to refresh the data when published to the cloud, even if the Web page does not require any authentication.

There is a possible work around.

In PowerQuery ("Transform data" when you connect to the Web Page in Power BI desktop) Change the "source" line, often the first line of the Power Query steps, from " = WebBrowserContents("**your URL **")" to " = WebContents("**your URL **")".

Microsoft's documentation states that:

Web.BrowserContents "Returns the HTML for the specified url, as viewed by a web browser."

whereas

Web.Contents "Returns the contents downloaded from url as binary"

So, depending on the web page you are using, you may see a difference, but in most cases this works fine.

Once you've made the change you'll need to go to the Credentials part of the Dataset settings for the web element...

and there Click on "edit credentials" and there set the Authentication Method to "Anonymous"

That should allow you then to scredule Refreshing for the web-page in Service.

Hope this helps

Stuart