Forum Discussion

09Ishan's avatar
09Ishan
New Member
2 years ago

"Power BI Salesforce Data Source Connection Issue: Desktop Success, Service Failure"

Hello Power BI community, I am encountering an issue while refreshing a Power BI report that uses Salesforce as a data source. The error message I'm receiving is "Unable to connect to data source un...
Need Help
metrica's avatar
metrica
Post Prodigy
3 months ago

Hi 09Ishan,

 

The "Unable to connect to data source undefined" error is a bit different from the usual "invalid credentials" pattern - "undefined" usually means the Service can't resolve the actual data source URL from your dataset metadata. Two common causes:

 

  1. Dynamic source expression in M code - if your Salesforce.Data(...) call uses a variable or parameter for the URL (rather than a hard-coded string), Power BI Service refuses to refresh it for security reasons. Republishing with a static URL in the Source step usually fixes this.
  2. My Domain / custom domain change in Salesforce - if your org enabled My Domain or changed its instance URL recently, the Service's cached connection points to the old URL while Desktop discovers the new one on the fly.

If those don't resolve it, Power BI Connector for Salesforce on AppExchange is an alternative worth knowing - the connection lives inside your Salesforce org rather than in Power BI Service's data source registry, so this category of "undefined source" issues doesn't come up.

 

Free 30-day trial, details at https://metricasoftware.com/, demo on request.

 

Cheers,

Metrica Team.