Tile Refresh

[jbowler]

I understand tile refreshes are unable to respond to changes in filter criteria. E.g. Modify the filter criteria in Desktop (any level), then republish. Tiles will still display the filter at the time tile was initially set.

Firstly - it would be great if the tile refresh capability could be updated to take into account changes in filter critiera from desktop?

To workaround I physically add (& strip) values direct from my source file. It's a hack but essentially the tile will pick up direct data entry and deletions from PBI desktop. I could also add/delete values directly in my desktop file, just as long as I don't employ any filter critiera to try and control what I want to show - as mentioned tile refreshes don't respond.

Is anyone else using a more elegant solution to refresh tiles properly?

Thanks

[greggyb]

The feature is very much on purpose and useful. One thing I commonly do in reports for clients is to have a few sections on a dashboard including filtered versions of report charts. E.g. a dashboard (or section) for each major product category for sales. If tiles always reflected the saved filters in the report, I would need to maintain an identical report in many duplicate copies with slightly different filter settings, just to support a dashboard.

The typical concern around wanting tiles to have auto-updating filters is for date filters, e.g. always show current month. For this sort of thing, we can solve it with a little bit of modelling. Power Query offers some great date functions, like Date.IsInCurrentMonth(), Date.IsInCurrentQuarter(), Date.IsInCurrentYear(), Date.IsYearToDate(), and similar. You can use these to create fields that will always have True in the appropriate time frame. Thus your tile filter can be set to [Current Month] = True. Then, as the data is refreshed, the dates that have [Current Month] = True change, but your filter is always the same.