How to update Office 365 password in Power BI dataset refresh

I recently changed my Office 365 user password for an account that I was using for a Power BI Dataset Scheduled Refresh.

The result was that my Power BI Refresh failed which looked like screenshot below.

powerbi sharepoint dataset - update password-01

So all I had to do was update the authentication Power BI was using to access my Office 365 Sharepoint folder.

It was clear that the Edit credentials link was where I needed to update the password.

That link got me the following page where I selected oAuth2 which is referring to the authentication that Power BI uses with my Office 365 user credentials.

powerbi sharepoint dataset - update password-02

Selecting oAuth2 popped a new browser window where I could enter my Office 365 user and new password and authenticate Power BI.

powerbi sharepoint dataset - update password-1

After clicking Sign In I was returned to the Power BI page and the credential errors above were gone and I could successfully refresh the dataset from my Office 365 Sharepoint files.

powerbi sharepoint dataset - update password-4

The Refresh Schedule log showed the previous failed refresh attempt and the just completed successful refresh. Back in business!

powerbi sharepoint dataset - update password-3

Use OneDrive API to upload files to Office 365 Sharepoint Site

I have automated uploading files from my web site host’s server to my Office 365 Sharepoint site using scheduled cron jobs running Python scripts on my web host.

The Python scripts use Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory Library (ADAL) to authenticate off Azure Active Directory (Azure AD or ADD), and  OneDrive API and Python Requests to use the authentication to upload the files to Sharepoint from my web host.

Here is the code

import adal
import urllib
import requests

## set variables
username = '[email protected]'
password = 'password'
authorization_url = 'https://login.windows.net/contoso.onmicrosoft.com' # aka Authority
redirect_uri = 'https://login.microsoftonline.com/login.srf' # from Azure AD application
client_id = 'd84cbf4f-dc23-24d1-8a7d-08ff8359879a' # from Azure AD application
file_url = 'https://contoso.sharepoint.com/_api/v2.0/drive/root:/myfoldername/myfilename.csv:/content'

## use ADAL to create token response
token_response = adal.acquire_token_with_username_password(
        authorization_url,
        username,
        password
    )

## Use ADAL to create refresh token and save as text file to reuse
refresh_token = token_response['refreshToken']
refresh_token_file = open('refresh_token.txt', 'w')
refresh_token_file.write(refresh_token)
refresh_token_file.close()

## Get saved refresh token and use it to get new token response
refresh_token = open('refresh_token.txt', 'r').read()
token_response = adal.acquire_token_with_refresh_token(authorization_url, str(refresh_token))

## get access_token from token response JSON string
access_token = token_response.get('accessToken')

## create http header to send access token to authenticate
headers = {'Authorization':'BEARER ' + str(access_token)}

## example to upload file
upload_file = requests.put(file_url, data = open('myfilename.csv', 'rb'), headers=headers)

 

There are many things to consider when working with Microsoft’s APIs to work with its online services such as Office 365.

The first is how to authenticate. Microsoft is trying to move everyone to use Azure AD to do oAuth authentication. Microsoft services still have their own authentication methods but this exercise I used Azure AD.

The second is what API to use. Microsoft has recently released their Graph API that is ‘one endpoint to rule them all’. However Microsoft services still have their own API’s so while Graph API looks tempting for this exercise I used the OneDrive API.

Azure AD Authentication

The authentication will be done in two parts.

  1. Create Azure AD application to do the authentication for the Microsoft service(s) you want to interact with.
  2. Use ADAL to interact with Azure AD to do the oAuth flow.

Setup Azure AD – create application

Microsoft provides free use of Azure AD for light authentication needs. You can register and create account. Once you have your account you need to create a new application.

For my purposes I created an Azure AD native client application. Azure AD also has web application and web APIs but both require user to enter username and password in web browser. The native client application does technically also require user to enter these too but I hacked past this by using ADAL user authentication and hard coding username and password into the Python code. Since these are going onto my web host in protected directory to run as cron jobs they will be safe.

I am not going to go through the detail of creating an Azure AD application there are some good blog posts and Microsoft does good job of describing it. For example take a look at this site which has decent information about creating a new Azure AD application.

The Azure AD applications allow you to choose which Microsoft services it will be used to authenticate. Confusingly these are also called ‘applications’ too. They are represent Microsoft Services such as Office 365 Sharepoint Online, OneNote, Power BI, etc and is the place where you assign the permissions (also called ‘scopes’) that authentication will allows with that Microsoft service.

An Azure AD application might provide authentication for more than one Microsoft Service. But my native client application has only Windows Azure Active Directory permissions (which are there by default) and Office 365 Sharepoint Online permissions set to Read and write user files and Read and write items in all site collections.

After you have created your client application make sure to copy the client_id and resource_uri to use in code below. The client_id is automatically assigned and the resource_uri for a native client app can be any url and is just a unique identifier. I chose the Office 365 login url. The web applications need a real url because that is where the user will be prompted to enter credentials.

Azure Active Directory Library (ADAL)

Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory Library (ADAL) authentication libraries are created for developer’s to use with Azure AD. I used the ADAL Python SDK which was easily installed with pip install adal. 

The oAuth authentication flow can seem very complex but you don’t have to worry about that if you use ADAL. ADAL uses your Azure AD application credentials (client_id, resource_uri in case of native client application) to retrieve a token response which is a text string in JSON format.

This JSON string includes the actual access token that is used to authenticate accessing Sharepoint and upload the files. You can use Python to retrieve the access token (it is a Dictionary). Then you simply put the access token into a header that will be used in the Put Request as the method of passing the access token to the OneDrive API.

ADAL also takes care of refreshing tokens which expire. In my case where the scripts are running on the server as cron jobs I want the token to refresh automatically. ADAL gets a refresh token that you can save to get a new access token when previous one expires. I actually write the refresh token to a text file on the server and refresh the access token each time code is run. I could only refresh it if the previous one expires.

OneDrive API

The OneDrive API has different configurations depending on whether you are using it to access a OneDrive Personal, OneDrive Business or Sharepoint Online account.

Be warned that the documentation for OneDrive API can be very dense and there are different ways of presenting required syntax to identify interactions. Of course the representations vary with different SDKs too.  Also there are different versions of Microsofts file storage services over the years. So I recommend to focus on the newest OneDrive API and make sure you are looking at documentation relevant to newest version.

The Gotchas

ADAL Default Values

ADAL has default client_id and resource values that it uses for the username authentication. I changed these default values to match my Azure AD application.

Before changing these I was getting an Invalid audience Uri error

{“error”:”invalid_client”,”error_description”:”Invalid audience Uri ‘https:\/\/m
anagement.core.windows.net\/’.”}

This error means the url being used to create the token response was not same as the one that the file was being uploaded to.

EDIT August 21, 2016 Microsoft has updated the ADAL library so that you can specify the client id and the resource value because authentication against different services needs different client id and resource endpoint urls. That means the hack I used below is no longer required. For more details seehttps://github.com/AzureAD/azure-activedirectory-library-for-python

In ADAL’s __init__.py file look for the class _DefaultValues class at bottom of code and replace the default values:

  • I changed client_id to my application’s client_id
  • I changed resource from https://management.core.windows.net/ to https://tenant.sharepoint.com/

The acquire_token_with_username_password function sets these to None so they get set to default values. So this could be changed so they accept values from the code.

Sharepoint Site and Folder Paths

The OneDrive API dev documentation https://dev.onedrive.com/getting-started.htm demonstrates the different service urls:

  • OneDrive – https://api.onedrive.com/v1.0
  • OneDrive for Business – https://{tenant}-my.sharepoint.com/_api/v2.0
  • SharePoint Online – https://{tenant}.sharepoint.com/{site-relative-path}/_api/v2.0

The {site-relative-path} notation indicates the Sharepoint site name. My site didn’t have this because it was default site. However you might have to add your site relative path.

Also the Sharepoint url for the file I was uploading looked like this:

https://contoso.sharepoint.com/Shared%20Documents/myfoldername/myfilename.csv

However you will note that the file_url in the code doesn’t make any reference to the Shared%20Documents:

https://contoso.sharepoint.com/_api/v2.0/drive/root:/myfoldername/myfilename.csv:/content

 

Careful! Don’t click “Try Power BI for free”

This was a weird quirk.

I have Power BI Free account and uploaded a report to Power BI Service. The report has dataset that gets data from a Sharepoint file.

In Power BI Service I went to the dataset “Schedule Refresh”, selected “Connect Directly”, “Enter Credentials” as oAuth, then entered my Office 365 credentials. This setup the connection successfully to the Sharepoint file, and then I could switch the “Keep your data up to date” to “Yes”.

Then I accidentally clicked the “Try Pro for Free” button.

From that point on, every time I selected the Power BI Service dataset or the report, I got a pop up blocking message “To see this report upgrade to power bi pro”.

pro upgrade

The only way to make it stop was to switch the “Keep your data up to date” to “No”.

The only Pro feature is hourly updates. The Free Power BI Service version only allows daily updates. I hadn’t selected hourly updates so that wasn’t the problem. Just some weird quirk.

The resolution was to delete the report and dataset that I just scheduled refresh for, and then upload the report again and then redo the schedule refresh as per above (without accidentally clicking on the Try Pro for free button) to make it work again.

How to schedule Power BI dataset refresh

Do you want to create a Power BI Report that gets a daily scheduled refresh of data from a Sharepoint csv file?

The first step is to create your Power BI report in Power BI Desktop using the Sharepoint csv file as data source.

In Power BI Desktop use Get Data – File – Sharepoint Folder to connect to your Sharepoint Folder.

The resulting dataset query (Power Query) will look something like mine below. You will replace “mydomain” with your Sharepoint account name or domain.

You will also replace “datafile.csv” with your csv file name. The Power BI connection is to a Sharepoint folder which might have more than one file like I did. If you have only one file in the folder the filter will be redundant but can’t hurt.

let
Source = SharePoint.Files("https://mydomain.sharepoint.com", [ApiVersion = 15]),
#"Filtered Rows" = Table.SelectRows(Source, each ([Name] = "datafile.csv")),
#"Combined Binaries" = Binary.Combine(#"Filtered Rows"[Content]),
#"Imported CSV" = Csv.Document(#"Combined Binaries",[Delimiter=",", Columns=11, Encoding=1252, QuoteStyle=QuoteStyle.None]),
#"Promoted Headers" = Table.PromoteHeaders(#"Imported CSV")
in
#"Promoted Headers"

After you publish your report to your Power BI Online account you can select your newly uploaded dataset’s “Schedule Refresh” property where you can set up the refresh schedule.

schedule_refresh

 

First go to “Gateway connection”.

I selected “Connect Directly” which requires that you also enter Sharepoint credentials in the “Edit credentials” link which pops up a web page that prompts you to login into your Sharepoint account. This gives Power BI Service permission to access your Sharepoint account to refresh file.

If you have an enterprise gateway setup you could try “Enterprise Gateway” and enter the required credentials for that.

 

gateway_connection

 

If you entered credentials correctly you should now be able to select the “Keep your data up to date” switch to “Yes”.

Then you can select which four 6-hour window you want refresh to run. Power BI Service free accounts can do daily refreshes. Pro accounts can have hourly updates.

As an aside be warned that if you click the “Try Pro for free” button you might get a blocking message that you are using Pro feature. This happened to me and was clearly a quirky error. I had to delete my report and dataset and re-upload them and redo the scheduling to get rid of the error.

schedule_refresh_option

 

You can try refreshing the dataset manually (On demand) or wait for the next scheduled refresh (Scheduled) to happen to see if the data does refresh. You can see refreshes are successful and when they ran by clicking the “refresh history ” link.

refresh_history

 

 

Power BI Online – get data from Office 365 Sharepoint file

I want to create a Power BI Online report with a data source from a file on a remote web server that updates automatically so my Power BI report is always up to date.

Power BI Desktop and Online have lots of data connectors to third party ‘Online Services’ eg Salesforce, Mailchimp, Github, etc, as well as file and database connectors. But none of these help to get the file from my remote server directly.

There is no feature to connect to a file on a remote server. I could put my remote file data into MySQL or Postgres database and Power BI could connect to those but my remote server doesn’t allow external connections to hosted databases. So that is not an option for me.

A Power BI Online report can get data from a Sharepoint site file that will update automatically on schedule.

Since I have an Office 365 E3 account which has Sharepoint site I upload my remote file to the Sharepoint site and create a Power BI Online report linked to that Sharepoint file.

I would still have to figure out how to automate uploading my remote server file to my Office 365 E3 account Sharepoint site. But I am pretty sure I can do that with the OneDrive API but more on that in Part 2.

Here is a diagram outlining what I think my solution could be.

powerbidatapath

In the meantime to test using Office 365 Sharepoint file as data source for a Power BI Online report, I created a Power BI report in Desktop with file data source from my Office 365 Sharepoint site and Published it to my Power BI Online account.

After publishing the report to my Power BI Online account, I logged into Power BI Online, opened the newly published report and went to data source options and selected ‘Schedule Refresh’ which produced screen below.

onedriverefresh

I set ‘Keep your data up to date’ to ‘Yes’ and selected ‘Connect Directly’ which gave me error message telling me I had to update credentials.

Not surprisingly the report I published to Power BI Online didn’t ‘remember’ that I had already authorized the Power BI Desktop report to get file from my Office 365 Sharepoint site so I have to do it again in Power BI Online.

So I selected ‘Edit Credentials’ and then selected ‘oAuth’ as type of credentials which popped up Office 365 login screen where I entered my user and password clicked login and was returned back to Power BI online page.

The error message was gone so this must have created oAuth authentication to link the file data source from my Office 365 Sharepoint site into the data source in Power BI Online.

Then I set the automatic refresh to one of the daily 6-hour windows (below i have selected 12 pm to 6 pm) for refresh to run (hourly refresh is a Power BI Pro feature).

The report data source now refreshes from my Sharepoint file on daily automatic schedule so it looks like I am half way to my solution.

I will write another blog post detailing how I will automate moving my data file from my remote server to my Office 365 Sharepoint site. Pretty sure I will be using the OneDrive API https://dev.onedrive.com but there are other options too.

In the meantime talk a look at the previous blog post summarizing the OneDrive and Sharepoint API options.

One challenge I have encountered so far is that the OneDrive Python SDK is made for web apps and I want to setup server app (native client app).  More to come.