Embedded Report Iframe Caching

[kevin_from_sol]

Good day,

Setup:

• Embeddeding reports in a iframe for website publication
• Report data is set to refresh every hour
  • Confirmed data being refreshed successfully, both on the service and by performing an export from any visual element - shows the updated data.

Observered issue:

• If you set a filter i.e. relative date, last 6 hours - you see a set of data
  • Request sent to the service
• After refresh, this data is not updated
• If you change a filter i.e. change from 6 hours to 5 hours - you see the new data
  • Request send to the service
• If you change back to the original filter (i.e. 6 hours) - you see the old data
  • No request sent to the service
• If you reload the iframe (or open in a new window) - the data is presented / new requests are sent for data.

Conclusion:

• embedded powerBI iframe is caching the requests from the client.  To not re-request data that has previously been pulled.  
• Issue is that if a data refresh occurs, the reports will not update at any point until a filtering change is made.

Questions:

• Is there a way to disable caching on the iframe? To force on each filtering change to request back to the service for the data?
  • Want to avoid having to do a forced iframe reload after a data refresh action.
• Is there a established work around for this behaviour?

Thank you for any guideness in advance,

Kevin.

[kevin_from_sol]

Good day,

Thank you for comments; thus far we have:
1. Tried updating the Query Caching options - they did not alter this observed behaviour

2. We did confirm that the reloading of data is operational / no issues when doing export for example that supports that indeed the latest data is presented after the scheduled refresh.

3. Refresh option (via the API) updated the data, but upon clicking that - we still noticed that the requests are not going to the server (appears to be still cached in the browser)

Conclusion comment on refreshing the page (the iframe) on reload is what we are hitting as well - was hoping there was other options possible.  i.e. on hitting our reload button, it does the API call out the powerBI and after which does a force reload of the iframe.   This does work, but again, reaching out to see if there was any more graceful solutions.

Thank you again,

Kevin.

[kevin_from_sol · Accepted solution]

I am going to close this topic as "Accept as Solution" - but with the cavaet the solution we found that worked is not the official expected solution.  (we are using Import Mode for the reports, not direct query)

Leveraging the "report.refresh()" functionality after the reload event has addressed the caching behaviour.

Link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/javascript/api/overview/powerbi/embedding-basic-interactions#refre...

Thank you for your time, and this may help someone else with a similiar behaviour in future,

Kevin.

[GilbertQ]

Hi @kevin_from_sol 

Firstly, could you make sure that you have turned off the query caching as shown below?

Also by design, the power VR service caches the data so that the reports can render faster for users until they interact with the visuals. The only other. way I can think is that you would have to reload the entire page to see the latest visual Or you could actually try the report page refresh option?

Automatic page refresh in Power BI Desktop - Power BI | Microsoft Learn