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

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone

I have a dataset using data from Dynamics CRM online (Odata) and this has always worked fine with an automated nightly refresh.

I've added a web datasource to the dataset which is a website containing currency exchange rate and now the refresh has been disabled. 

When I go to the settings I see that it has been disabled because there is no gateway and the setting 'Use an On-premises or VNet data gateway' has been set to 'on' and cannot be changed.

Is this because of the added datasource of Web? if so, how can I change this to also be refreshed without a gateway?

[Burningsuit · Accepted solution]

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

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much, this works!