User refresh on PBI Service

[yaman123]

Hi, 

Is there a way for another user with admin rights to refresh PBI reports on the desktop and on the service. Each time I have been absent and a report needs refreshed, there is a error for the user as they need authorisation access to the datasource but the files are on sharepoint and other locations where the user has access to these. 

Also they need to map the datasource on the PBI service against to the files/queries used from the gateway. 

Is there a way for another user, to efficiently refresh the power bi report in desktop without any issues and to eliminate the use of mapping of the datasources on the service each time? 

Thanks

[christinepayton]

If you schedule refresh on the reports in the service, they will run even if you are not around. If you want to future-proof it, have a service account take over the dataset/scheduled refresh (that way it's not linked to your account at all). 

When a different person opens a PBIX, it'll trigger them to re-authenticate on all the sources, so it's really better to just schedule the refresh (SharePoint totally supports scheduled refresh). 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/refresh-scheduled-refresh

[yaman123]

Hi @christinepayton 

I should have mentioned that scheduled refresh is on. I have to manually add an image to the report each week hence why I need to refresh the report manually on desktop. 

[christinepayton]

Have you considered dynamically pulling in the images? You could upload them to a SharePoint folder and use that as a query and display it that way, so that the only thing you'd need to do is upload the file and it'd automatically show up in the report after the scheduled refresh. 

The only weirdness with this is that the images do not show up in the desktop app at all, only in the service (it's a weird auth thing). 

If you still want to refresh in the desktop each time, you would need to give the person refreshing access to the source (or use a service account). 

[yaman123]

Currently I receive an image each week and I replace the image in the report. If the user was to go back and check the history, this cant be done as the image is the latest one. Is there a way for an image to be dynamically updated in the report as I need the Week Commencing field and the image for that week. I did think about creating an excel file with 2 columns - wc and image but dont think this can be done. I am open to any solutions you have? 

[christinepayton]

It depends on how you are embedding the image - but if you're embedding it in, say, a table, you can use the "image URL" category in your datasource for that column in a table to display it as an image. Again, for SharePoint images, this won't work in the desktop, but you can see them when published (I publish to my personal workspace first to verify they work). 

You can just straight-up upload and replace the image each time to a SharePoint library, then the scheduled refresh will pick it up. You can access the image path a number of ways, I prefer OData to get the file path. I did a tutorial on how to do this for hyperlinks, the process would be the exact same for an image except you'd just choose "image url" as the data category for the column (obviously filter the query down to just the one file you want to display): https://youtu.be/yeIQ9jKln_I?si=EaiTpbu7IEWAPPJf

Here's the dropdown to do that: