Incremental Refresh download .pbix

[Strizzolo]

Hi,

I have a question regarding Incremental Refresh. I know that, once published on the service and refreshed, I cannot download the dataset.

Is there a workaround? Can I disable, someway, Incremental Refresh and then download the .pbix?

Thank you all.

[JayUD]

Hi. Can incremental refresh be switched off / on using the Rest API?

[lbendlin]

Sort of. You can merge all partitions into one via XMLA commands and change the partition meta data. That will then be equivalent to not having set up incremental refresh.

[karo]

Hi,

Any new ideas in this topic? I really would like to download the .pbix from cloud to change the parameter, however without a risk of historical data changes in the report.

Regards,

Karo

[lbendlin]

Icey's answer still stands as the fastest approach. You can play around with ALM Toolkit if you want, but that requires a lot more work.

[Icey · Accepted solution]

Hi @Strizzolo ,

One workaround, you can turn off Incremental refresh on Power BI Desktop, and then republish it to Power BI Service and replace the earlier report. After this, you can download the PBIX file.

Best Regards,

Icey

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Anonymous]

@Strizzolo    what happens if something happens to your desktop version and you need the one that is in the cloud to make changes to it?  So once you upload is it locked and lost to you?  This seems like a major disadvantage to me.

[lbendlin]

You should have your own version control system (until the Power BI team implements it). At a minimum you should export your Power BI desktop file to a .pbit (template) and do it often. Place that .pbit into a Github folder and you have the start of a solution. 

If you want to be a little more fancy you can unpack the .pbit (which is an archive, just like the .pbix - with out the data) and run a little powershell script to create usable (readable files with the schema and formulas etc).

Or you coud go full ALM Toolkit - but that's probably overkill.

[zuheirashraf17]

We just about to implement the incremental refresh option. But this issue has stop us from proceed to implement it. Being able to download it from the cloud bring a huge advantage to the team-based Power BI report development. When the report is published to the service and it is locked and lost forever in the cloud is not collaboration friendly I'd say.

Hoping to find some alternative on this options.