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Contingent Power BI Dataset Refreshes

Chris Webb has an interesting problem to solve:

This week a customer came to me with the following problem: they had scheduled the refresh of their dataset but their source data wasn’t always ready in time, so the old data was being loaded by mistake. The best solution here is to use some kind of external service (for example Power Automate) to poll the data source regularly to see if it’s ready, and then to refresh the dataset via the Power BI REST API when it is. However, it got me thinking about a different way of tackling this: is it possible to write some M code that will do the same thing? It turns out that it is, but it’s quite complicated – so I don’t recommend you use the code below in the real world. Nevertheless I wanted to write up the solution I came up with because it’s interesting and you never know, it might be useful one day.

Read on for the less-than-optimal solution, but do check out the better solution Chris describes.