Broken visuals cause slideshow to pause until user restarts it.
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Dave
Sometimes we see Power BI have a blip where a visual won't load, it's just a transitory issue that can be caused by any number of things (network, Power BI, gremlins). A page refresh would fix it on a normal browser, but displagent picks up the error and ceases to function when ideally it should just continue and log the error so if it is a longer term issue with a report it can be identified.
Having it stop the slideshow dead means unattended installations need constant babysitting, which isnt ideal.
Daniel Miradakis
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Daniel Miradakis
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Daniel Miradakis
Thanks for letting me know about this! You're saying that if an individual visual stops working, the entire slideshow stops functioning? Could you send me a log file or two from the troublesome machine so that I can take a look through the logs to see if I can find anything? If so, please email them to daniel@displagent.io
And these visuals that sometimes have blip: do they happen in the middle of an active slideshow that is running? If you have any log files you could send me, I would very much like to take a look. You can find logs at Help > Open Logs from the menu at the top.
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Dave
Daniel Miradakis Can't export logs unfortunately (running on locked down kiosk machines) but parapharasing from one entry I can find:
08:55:54 An Error Occurred in Embedded report. "This page my not exist or may not be a valid destination"
08:55:54 Active report slideshow detected. Stopping the report slideshow...
08:55:54 Stopping the report slideshow...
08:57:36 Attempting CustomerRopc login to Microsoft...
So it appears it does try to continue in the background, but the broken report remains on screen until we manually intervene. I can't find anything in the logs for when a single visual throws an error (which was transitory)
Both errors were showing in a displagent popup once I stopped the slideshow by hitting escape, so it had caught them.
Daniel Miradakis
Dave Ah, perfect - thank you for letting me know about the popup. Report Slideshows have an error popup that may appear if something like this happens, and I was wondering if you had happened to come across it.
I'll research this error and see what I can find. I believe you are correct in that this is an erroring that happens within Power BI itself, specifically, the Power BI Javascript library that I'm using from Microsoft itself. I suspect these are weird transitory/blip errors as you mentioned, in which case we may not be able to prevent them.
However, I've been sitting on a self-repair feature for a while that I've considered building. Basically, if that popup appears and is detected, Displagent could attempt a slideshow relaunch/re-embedding where it just restarts the entire slideshow process. I don't want to get someone caught in an infinite loop in case something is truly wrong with the report, but if it's a transitory blip like you mentioned, I was thinking I could add a self-repair/restart feature in.
While I lookup the provided errors you mentioned, I'll draw up this feature and see what it would take to add.
How frequently is this happening on your machines? And on how many machines? I'd like to get an idea for max impact.
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Dave
Daniel Miradakis The self-repair sounds like a good feature. Of the 5 machines we have we see it every 3 days or so. We've begun to implement a nightly machine reboot to try and mitigate it, but Displagent handling it gracefully would be really good.
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Dave
Daniel Miradakis Just managed to catch it again. This is from the report embed error popup that appears under the full screen report. Hopefully this helps your investigations:
QueryUserError
Couldn't load the data for this visual. Could not render a report visual titled: xxxx
Daniel Miradakis
Dave Thanks so much for posting that new error message!
I think I've seen this error before, it was usually a transitory/weird internal Power BI error if I recall correctly. If these errors truly are transitory, then a simple self-repair attempt should likely take care of this. Will ping you again with the self-repair ticket once I make it.
If you end up finding a way to send me a log file, please let me know! If not, though, I still think I have all of the info that I need. Your error messages are very helpful, and I know just the popup you are referring to.
I'm continuing to look into this, going to see if I can ship a self-repair feature quickly in the next day or two.
Daniel Miradakis
Dave Just providing a quick update, I'm working on a repair solution for this and should have it ready in the next day or two. Hopefully it will autonomously handle these transient errors so that you won't even have to worry about them.
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Dave
Daniel Miradakis Amazing, thank you!