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wynhopkins
Most Valuable Professional
Most Valuable Professional

Enterprise Gateway mapped network drive issue

I'm hoping I'm missing something but here's the scenario I encounter when trying to set up Enterprise Gateway.

 

I built a simple Power BI Dektop file that pulls data from an Excel stored on our company's W drive.

 

I publish this to PowerBI.com

 

I have Enterprise Gateway installed, so I set up a data set.  It won't allow me to use W:\  so I have to use the full UNC  \\ABC-SRV-XYZ\\ etc

 

Then I need to go back to my PBI Desktop file and change my W:  drive source reference to the full UNC, then re-publish.

 

Then I can select the Enterprise Gateway data source via Scheduled Refresh.

 

 

Is this common / are there alternatives?

MVP | Author of Power BI for the Excel Analyst | Speaker | Power BI & Excel Developer & Instructor | YouTube- 5 million views | Fan of Power Query & XLOOKUP | Purpose: Making life easier for people through applying and sharing knowledge.
1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Hi wynhopkins,

 

Generally yes. Mapped drives are only available on your machine locally, which is not available on your network, the UNC path is the workable path for the shared drives in your network environment.

Also the error told that "can't connect to the mushup data source." For the gateway service, it won't recognise the W:\ through the network, which is only a shortcut of the shared path on your local machine.

Regards

 

View solution in original post

12 REPLIES 12
Ehren
Microsoft Employee
Microsoft Employee

Hi Wyn. I know this is an old thread, but this topic recently came up internally and this thread was referenced.

 

It sounds like mapped network drives work fine in PBIDesktop. This indicates that we do support them, as long as they're accessible from the Windows account the mashup engine is running under.

 

By default, the gateway runs under the gateway service account. My guess is that most of the time, such mapped network drives aren't available to the gateway service account.

 

Did you try configuring the file/folder connector for the mapped network drive to use Windows auth, with the creds for a Windows user who has access to the mapped drive on the gateway server?

ahussnain
Frequent Visitor

I have the same issue with a twist: In my network, all computers have mapped drives. And due to policy restrictions, I cannot find the name of the storage server in \\xyz\abc\fn.xls format; it has to be X:\abc\fn.xls and this path is gaurenteed to be available on our Power BI server. I don't have a way of giving a network share path. What do I do?

wynhopkins
Most Valuable Professional
Most Valuable Professional

Hi @ahussnain,  when you say the path is guaranteed to be available on the Power BI server what do you mean?   

 

I don't think I'm going to have an answer for you but I'm keen to understand the issue.

 

Are you able to save the Excel file to OneDrive?   Then you don't need Gateway?

MVP | Author of Power BI for the Excel Analyst | Speaker | Power BI & Excel Developer & Instructor | YouTube- 5 million views | Fan of Power Query & XLOOKUP | Purpose: Making life easier for people through applying and sharing knowledge.

We have an on-premise PowerBI Server. All computers on our network/domain use the mapped drives, the drive mapping is built into our SOE (standard operating env) i.e. each computer has S: drive mapped with personal folder, X: drive with folder for each department and thus we can send the file links to each other on X drive instead of sending the attachments. Since PowerBI Server host is also on our network/domain, the path is gauranteed to be availble.

Given the nature of data we deal with, this data can't be placed on cloud.

v-micsh-msft
Microsoft Employee
Microsoft Employee

Hi wynhopkins,

Yes this is common.

To have the "W:\" drive be accessed from other places, we need its UNC path.

For the local computer, the drive should be mapped already, so there is no need to use its UNC path locally. Actually when connecting to the network drive, the local NIC is still querying with the UNC.

This is similar to the thread below:

Schedule Data Refresh Issues

If any further help needed, please post back.

Regards

wynhopkins
Most Valuable Professional
Most Valuable Professional

thanks @v-micsh-msft

 

So while my Power BI desktop file creates a connection based on W:\  I will always need to go into that query and manually change this to the \\SERVER-NAME\etc path if I want to be able to refresh via Gateway?

MVP | Author of Power BI for the Excel Analyst | Speaker | Power BI & Excel Developer & Instructor | YouTube- 5 million views | Fan of Power Query & XLOOKUP | Purpose: Making life easier for people through applying and sharing knowledge.

Hi wynhopkins,

 

Generally yes. Mapped drives are only available on your machine locally, which is not available on your network, the UNC path is the workable path for the shared drives in your network environment.

Also the error told that "can't connect to the mushup data source." For the gateway service, it won't recognise the W:\ through the network, which is only a shortcut of the shared path on your local machine.

Regards

 

You have repeated this answer through this thread or it has been quoted.   

 

My question is:  If a mapped drive is a shortcut, why can't Power Query or PowerBI simply translate that information from the shortcut (Mapped drive letter D:) and grab the full UNC to use even if it it only displays the Mapped drive letter?  Seems like an oversight in the programming especially when a novice (me) uses the browse button to connect to the data source.

Hi....

 

I have the same issue here but even if i use the UNC patch, the gateway doesnt allow me to use these files. It says "No se puede conectar con el origen de datos del mashup"

 

I think that is beacause when i connect to this share folder, i connect under "Connect using different credentials" option.

 

And when i tried to connect from power bi service it doesnt allow me to connect using windows credentials neither using "other credentials".

 

What can i do to solve this?

I'm having the same issue... I can't connect to a shared drive that requires different credentials than my windows login. Help?

Same issue, credentials are for a Synology NAS share, which has its own credentials.

If I could use Windows credentials on the NAS share, I would...

Anonymous
Not applicable

I am having a similar issue here with same error on gateway on-premises.

My server is running Linux.
I can map a folder as network drive, but once I try to add on gateway configuration I get this same error.
do you think this is an issue with linux server?
I tried to use both ways: Y:\ or the \\192.168.0.2\folders, but without success.

What should I do?

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