Schedule refresh with API requests

[Anonymous]

Hi PBI Community,

I am struggling with setting up the PowerBI Service scheduled refresh. My report is connected to a few SQL databases, Excel / CSV files, and has 3 API requests with dynamic URLs that have been converted to a function. These functions are then being invoked a few times from another 3 queries, for a set of pre-defined IDs.

I did some research and it looks like PowerBI doesn't quite support refreshing these web contents via Scheduled Refresh (it works perfectly fine when manually refreshed from PowerBI Desktop level). This is the message I am receiving:

So I thought, ok, let me be cheeky and simply disable these 3 API requests from the refresh queue. I went to PBI Desktop, right-click on each query > uncheck "Include in report refresh". However, after publishing the report back to PBI Service I am still getting the same error message ("query contains unsupported function").

Could you please advise if I'm going in the right direction? Or is it simply some unsupported functionality that will be developed in the future?

[Anonymous]

Hi Greg,

Thank you very much, this is useful. Thanks to the links you have provided I was able to identify this issue:

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Issues/quot-Include-in-report-refresh-quot-disabling-doesn-t-work-i...

I have also upvoted this Idea:

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/20579641-exclude-a-table-from-ref...

Sounds like an improvement worth waiting for 🙂

For now, I am stuck with manually refreshing my dataset via PowerBI Desktop and re-publishing it to PBI Service on a daily basis.

Best regards,
Justyna

[Greg_Deckler · Accepted solution]

I think I've actually run into this before where I had a query, turned off include in refresh and the Service still complained about the query. You could check the Issues forum here:

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Issues/idb-p/Issues

And if it is not there, then you could post it.

If you have Pro account you could try to open a support ticket. If you have a Pro account it is free. Go to https://support.powerbi.com. Scroll down and click "CREATE SUPPORT TICKET".