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Power BI

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Live reference for functionality difference between Cloud Service & Desktop

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Jack Vishneski's profile image

Jack Vishneski on 23 Mar 2018 04:46:36

It would be very helpful to have a (frequently updated or "living") specification document revealing the back-end variances between the Desktop and the Cloud Service. This would allow us to proactively plan for errors in the Cloud Service that surprise users because everything worked fine in the Desktop.

For example, we recently worked with a Microsoft support engineer on a Dataset that was failing to refresh in the Cloud Service, even though it worked fine in Desktop and at the source. We learned that the cause of the obscure "Not a legal OleAut date” error was due to the code path being slightly different between the queries used:

In the desktop, the query runs through an OLEDB-based provider and the conversion from CLR date to OLE date is handled by our own code (and the faulty value is silently replaced by NULL).

In the service, the query runs through an ADO.NET-based provider and the conversion from CLR date to OLE date is handled by some other layer which does not swallow the error but bubbles it out.