If you’ve ever worked with Power BI Report server there is a handy button in the top menu that says “Edit in Power BI Desktop”.
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And as you would expect this button will open the report you are currently viewing in Power BI Desktop where you can edit it. All in all a very handy button, particularly when you get sent a link to a report and get asked to help fix something or explain some data issue.
The Problem
However recently I started seeing the following error stating “Server is not reachable” any time I tried to use this button
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This is a bit strange as I’ve used this button many times before. So I tried going another way and using to File > Open in the Report Server version of Power BI Desktop and tried to open the report from the Report Server that way.
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However I was again met with the same “Sever is not reachable” error which is not very helpful as I was definitely able to reach that server and view reports on it.
When this first happened I just went back to the tile view in the Report Server portal and chose the download option from the “…” menu on the report, then I was able to open the local copy and sort out the issue I had been asked to look at.
But today it happened to me again and I decided to do some digging to see if I could get to the bottom of this.
An initial solution
Doing some searches turned up a number of people hitting similar issues.
There was this one where the person was trying to connect using the webservice url instead of the portal url. But I knew that was not the issue in my case.
Then I stumbled across this one which suggested adding your credentials to the Windows Credentials section of Credential Manager. This actually worked for me, but I was not overly happy with this approach as in a few month time when my password expires I’d have to remember to come in here again and update my password. The more likely scenario would be that I would forget to do this and a few weeks later I’d realise that the “Edit in Power BI Desktop” button had broken again.
However while I was in the Credential Manager I clicked over to the web credentials and noticed the following interesting entry that started with SsrsSessionResourceKeyPrefix…
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I knew that Power BI Report server was built on top of the old SSRS portal and when I expanded the entry it showed that these credentials had been saved by “Power BI”.
The Final Solution
Removing this entry and also removing the entry I just added to the Windows Credentials section fixed the issue properly. Now I don’t have to update a stored password and both the Edit in Power BI Desktop button and the File – Open option are both working as they should.
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