Is a gateway required for online refresh of web connection?

[mattkocak]

I've looked through various posts and questions regarding this and have been seeing conflicting information so I wanted to reach out for a clear answer.

The data source for my report is a public website (https://www.marketindex.com.au/commodities/lithium). I can refresh the dataset fine from Power BI Desktop, but get a "refresh failed because this dataset requires a gateway" error when I try to refresh the dataset from the online Power BI Service.

Is a gateway required to refresh a web connection dataset in Power BI Service? As I had mentioned, this is a public https website. On the Power BI Data Sources page it states that a gateway is required, but I've also read various posts mentioning that it isn't (maybe they were old though).

[otravers · Accepted solution]

Yes, that's the current and correct info:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/connectors/web/web-troubleshoot

If memory serves, this did change several years ago so you might have looked at blog posts written prior to the change. Try using Web.Contents instead of Web.BrowserContents to avoid the need for a gateway:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerquery-m/web-contents