Forum Discussion
dataflow gen1
Hi remmypocco
Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Fabric community forum.
In Dataflow Gen1, this behavior is expected due to how Power Query Online handles data-source privacy. Even if all tables are from the same SharePoint site with identical URLs, credentials, and an Organizational privacy level, the online engine treats each entity in the dataflow as a separate data-source instance.
When you edit the dataflow and perform merge or append operations, Power Query Online re-applies privacy rules at edit time and interprets the operation as combining multiple sources. This privacy check does not happen during scheduled refresh, which is why refresh works with the validated mashup while editing can fail with a privacy error.
Unlike Power BI Desktop, Dataflow Gen1 does not inherit the “Ignore Privacy Levels” option and does not always provide privacy settings in the Service. Because of this, Gen1 cannot reliably support merges across multiple entities, even when they use the same SharePoint site and matching credentials and privacy levels.
With a standard star schema using separate fact and dimension tables, this is a known architectural limitation of Dataflow Gen1 rather than a configuration problem. The main options are to keep all merge logic in a single query chain with one SharePoint connection (which may not be practical for dimensional models), move merge and ID-generation to Power BI Desktop and use Gen1 dataflows only for ingestion, or migrate to Dataflows Gen2, which has a modern engine and consistent privacy handling.
I hope this helps. If you have more questions, feel free to ask and we’ll be glad to assist further.
Best Regards,
Microsoft Fabric Community Support Team.
Thank you for the reply,
For option 1 i cant seem to find anything in power bi service about dataflow privacy service, the settings on desktop ignores privacy.
for option 2 i wont be able to create a single entity that contains all transformation because for my report i have 4 dimension tables and one fact table. however merging is needed to create some IDs in the fact table to connect with the dimension tables. some dimension table are data i get from sharepoint dropped by client as its not in house data. so everything can be the same source however its the same sharepoint sites.
thank you
I'm wondering if this is the same issue I was seeing - but for me it seemed to run fine while editing/building but when I manually refreshed it failed (I haven't yet tried scheduled).
My goal was the same as yours - to add some IDs to a table from a separate files stored on the same SharePoint site. I can't tell if you're referring to files or SP lists, but I'll share what I had some luck with anyways, in case in helps.
In 1 table:
Import SharePoint folder, point to your SP site, filter down to the closest folder that both files share.
In Advanced Editor, create 2 tables using that same Source.
file_With_id = Source
....use Power Query to go through the steps to filter to the file you need and open binary/contents to get the data, do any formatting, etc
rename the last step to something friendly, like file_with_id_final
file_needing_id = Source
....use Power Query to go through the steps to filter to the file you need, open binary/contents to get the data, do any formatting, etc
rename the last step to something friendly, like file_needing_id_final
Then create a new step to merge the 2 tables. You probably won't be able to use the "Merge Queries" from the header, but you can re-use the one you have and just change out the table names.
Merged =
and walk through PQ to expand the ID from your file and do any transformations on the final table.
It seems to handle the merge better when I re-used the same Source reference to create each table.