Forum Discussion
Excel Datamodel scheduled refresh
- Anonymous2 years ago
Alan_ , so I'm not sure what the issue is, but the Power Automate task is failing on the refresh. It worked when I tested it, but on the schedule for the last 2 weeks, it has been failing:
{ "error": { "code": 504, "source": "flow-apim-msmanaged-na-northcentralus-01.azure-apim.net", "clientRequestId": "****" "message": "BadGateway", "innerError": { "status": 504, "message": "Request to Graph API has timed out.\r\nclientRequestId: ****", "error": { "message": "Request to Graph API has timed out." }, "source": "excelonline-ncus.azconn-ncus-001.p.azurewebsites.net"The Service Refresh is working fine. The Power Automate task runs after about an hour after the service refreshes the Dataset. The flow has 2 retries.
** UPDATE ** Turns out the refresh Office script is timing out due to it taking longer than the 2 minutes limit that Power Automate has for Office scripts. Changing the Timeout duration on the Run Script step does not fix this.
So knowing this, this "solution" is no longer the solution we thought it was. We need another way to do this.
** UPDATE 2 **
Turns out that I got the Power Automate to finally work! It takes about an hour and a few retries, but it finally refreshed successfully. I had to set Fixed Intervals on the Run Script Action Step, but that seemed to work. Will have to monitor the flow's performance next week. I upped the Count to 20. On the sucessful run it retried 5 times.
I'm sorry, I don't understand how is that different 😞 . I mean... the goal at the end of the day is to have the data up to date in a platform you can view, isn't it?. Right now, you are said you are uploading an excel as workbook just to help you keeping it up to date at power bi workspace. If you change that with a power bi dataset, you still have your data refreshing up to date at the same place. You won't need a different license if you limited. It's just a different content in the same place.
I might be missunderstanding something in my english reading, but it looks like no matter where the workbook comes from or is connecting, the way of sharing and reading reports future is power bi datasets. You can keep excels at cloud sure, but I wouldn't recommend connecting excels with sources, excel should be a source itself and if you have another one, just connect that to power bi dataset.
I hope I'm not missing the poin here and make sense for you 🙂
ibarrau , Thank you for your insight.
I just want to understand the path forward. If the current method of keeping our Excel Spreadsheets up to date using the Power BI Workspace is going away, how can we adapt the new method? Sorry I'm not quite getting this.
For example, lets say I have an Excel Workbook that is connecting to a Sharepoint List for a Source. There is some Power Query in there that has the output loaded to a Data Model and Pivot Table. Before I would just upload the Workbook (Datamodel) to the Power BI Workspace and schedule the refresh. Let's say this is updated each day at 6am to pull in the latest records from Sharepoint. Also the Excel file resides on a Sharepoint Document Library.
How would I do this now with the new changes?