Random Procrastination

Darren Gosbell

Tag: powerbi-report-server

Power BI Report Server – fixing “Can’t upload this report”

October 1, 2022 / / 0 Comments

A little while ago at my previous job we had a new user report an issue where they could not upload a Power BI Report to our Report Server and I found a simple fix which I thought was worth sharing.

In this case they were getting the error that the report was created with a recent version of Power BI Desktop that is not yet supported by this server.

So, how did this happen…

When you are running Power BI Report Server it is really important that your report authors use the Report Server version of Power BI Desktop that matches the release of your Server.

If you are not already aware there are actually 3 different distributions of Power BI Desktop

  • The Windows Store version
  • The Standalone installer version
  • The Power BI Report Server version

If you are running an on-prem Power BI Report Server, it is vital that you use the Report Server version of Power BI Desktop. Failing do so can mean that you may spend hours building a report that will not run on the server.

If you are not sure where to get this the Report Server Portal has a download link in the top right corner with a link (provided you are running one of the supported releases of Report Server, once the server goes out of support the downloads for Desktop are removed)

On my machine I have both the Microsoft Store version of desktop and the Report Server version. You can tell the difference because the Report Server version has a little black “RS” on the logo and the application title always includes the release month.

What had happened with this user was that someone had sent them a pbix file to work on. Being new to the organization they just downloaded the Microsoft Store version of Power BI Desktop, did their updates to the file and then tried to upload it to Power BI Report Server and this is when they got this error.

The problem is that now the file will not open in the Report Server version of Power BI Desktop since the file format has been updated to work with the newer version of Desktop from the Store.

Fix 1 – Manually rebuild the report

If your report is small and you realize this early, maybe just re-creating the report is an option, but often you do not realise this mistake until you have invested a significant amount of time in your report.

Fix 2 – Copy/Paste

One way to “fix” this is to run both the “Store” version of Desktop and the “Report Server” version of Desktop. Then open the file in the “Store” version of Desktop and manually copy the Power Query text from the Advanced editor, then copy measures and any calculated columns and tables, then copy visuals from one report to the other. As long as you have not used any new functionality that does not exist in Report Server this can work fine and is less work than a full manual re-build.

Fix 3 – Create a template file

This is the simplest option if it works.

All I did was to open the report in the “Store” version, did a “save as” and changed the type to a Power BI Template file. Then the user was able to open the resulting pbit file in the “Report Server” version of Desktop. Then I could refresh the data and upload it to Report Server.

This probably only works if you have not used functionality that only exists in the cloud service, but if you are using the lastest release of Report Server this number of things in this category should be relatively small. If you can identify any items like this, you may be able to remove them from your report before creating the template file.

Fixing incorrect date formats in Power BI Report Server when using Chrome or Firefox

March 31, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Reposted from 1 Mar 2019 from my old blog since geekswithblogs.net is down again at the moment: http://geekswithblogs.net/darrengosbell/archive/2019/03/01/fixing-incorrect-date-formats-in-power-bi-report-server-when.aspx

We are using Power BI Report server to publish Power BI Reports internally. And being in Australia we use a “sensible” date format of dd/mm/yyyy Smile 

However at a recent showcase with some of our end users they commented that our date format was “backwards” ie. mm/dd/yyyy

If you are using US regional settings on your PC you probably have not come across this issue, but for other regions this can be a problem.

Upon getting back to my desk I checked the report in Power BI Desktop and the date format was correctly picking up my local regional settings. I then opened the report in IE (which is what most of our End Users have as a default browser) and the report was still using the Australian format (dd/mm/yyyy):

DateSlicer-IE

However when opening the same report in Chrome or Firefox the date was using US regional settings (mm/dd/yyyy):

DateSlicer-Chrome

After doing some google/binging I found that both Chrome and Firefox have their own internal regional settings dialog and they both default to using US settings.

If you go into the Settings menu in Chrome and search for “Language” you will find the following, and it’s not just the default display language that matters the order is also important. Moving “English (Australia)” to the top of the list, then deleting cached images and files fixed this issue.

RegionalSettings-Firefox

Clicking on the 3 dots to the right of the language gives you an option to move that language to the top.

Firefox has a very similar language dialog and the same fix works for it too.

What this does behind the scenes is to change the “Accept-Language” headers that the browser sends to PBIRS to make your preferred language first in the list. This in turn alters the regional formatting setting javascript file that is sent down to the browser. Before this change I could see a file called angular-locale_en-us.js being used, after the change I now see angular-locale_en-au.js

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