Forum Discussion
report refresh not working for SharePoint Online data source
I figured out the cause of my problem. I'm helping out a colleague in this report, i.e., it's not mine. I wasn't aware of a piece of code in it that is dependent on a field that is behaving differently in PBI Service than in PBI Desktkop. The SPO list that this report sources from contains file attachments. The report tests for the presence of attachments. When the list is read in, it pulls the Attachments metadata field from SPO, which is a logical (TRUE/FALSE) data type in SPO. My colleage didn't explicitly cast it. So, it gets implicitly cast to a text data type in PBI. PBI Desktop maps TRUE to True and FALSE to False in that casting. But, PBI Service maps TRUE to -1 and FALSE to 0 in that casting. This behavior difference between Desktop and Service was resulting in the report appearing as though it wasn't refreshing. So, it's not a SPO-PBI problem after all. Rather, it's a code problem, which resulted from the unexpected behavior difference between Desktop and Service.
I have exactly the same issue. My reports will not update unless I perform a manual refresh from the Desktop App and then Publish.
My data source is a SharePoint list. I've created a report in PowerBi desktop and published online. Users update the SharePoint list but the PowerBI report online does not update. I have done three things which have not helped:
- Scheduled refresh (8x a day) - doesn't work
- Created a Power Automate flow which refreshes the data-set everytime the list is edited - doesn't work
- Created a "Power Automate" button on the report which users can click to manually fresh the data-set - doesn't work
Why is it so hard to get the report to update based on what the SharePoint list looks like? At this stage, I'd even take an hourly or even daily update!! Am I doomed to have to refresh the data-set in the desktop app manually and re-publish each time?