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Recovering Power BI Reports You Cannot Download

Kurt Buhler grabs a report:

Below are some reasons why you might not be able to download your Power BI report or model from a workspace:

  • The report was created in the service:
    • Someone created the report manually (using the User Interface) and connects to a model in another workspace.
    • Someone created the report programmatically (for instance, using the REST APIs).
    • Power BI created the report automatically (for instance, it copied the report to a workspace that belongs to a later stage in a deployment pipeline)
  • You used the REST APIs to re-bind a report (changed which model it connects to as a data source).
  • The model has incremental refresh enabled.
  • The model uses automatic aggregations.
  • The model was modified via an XMLA endpoint.
  • Other scenarios described in the limitations in the Microsoft documentation.

When you encounter this scenario, you see something like the following image, which shows the Download this file option greyed out from the File menu of the Power BI report.

Read on to see how you can nonetheless recover these published reports using the semantic-link-labs library.