OneDrive Refresh (link to .pbix saved in OneDrive/Teams/SharePoint)

[SusieBentley]

I have a .pbix file saved in Teams, so I'm using OneDrive refresh to update the report in the Service when changes are made to the Power BI Desktop file.

For an unknown reason, the link has been lost between the dataset saved in my workspace in the Service and the OneDrive location. So any changes made to the .pbix are no longer being reflected in the Service. The OneDrive refresh is failing with a message of "We are unable to locate the file on OneDrive for Business. Please check that the file exists in this location." and the OneDrive refresh toggle is off and can't be turned back on.

Is there anyway of re-establishing this connection?

The only way I can see to fix the issue is to delete the reprot/dataset from the workspace and republish. But this would mean recreating my Dashboard. I also use Power BI live connection from this data model, so have 30+ other .pbix files reliant on this as a datasource, so I would have to reconfigure all of these too.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

[GilbertQ · Accepted solution]

Hi there

I think once it is lost you have to re-create it all again.

What I would suggest is to use the Shared Datasets functionality in order to make sure other datasets rely on the shared dataset.

I personally have stayed away from the OneDrive method for this reason if something gets lots it has to be re-created.

Here is a blog post by my friend Seth explaining all the details: https://powerbi.tips/2019/09/updating-pbix-files-in-sharepoint-dos-donts/

[SusieBentley]

Thanks for your reply, and confirming my fear that there was no alternative but to republish!

It's a shame that there isn't a way to re-establish the connection, as it's a great feature when a .pbix file is being used in multiple workspaces (i.e. update the file once rather than republishing several times).

thanks again...

[GilbertQ]

Hi there

Yeah that was good before Shared datasets, but I would recommend the Shared datasets route going forward.