Refresh has been a bit of an issue with Power BI. The “old” version of Power BI bundled with Office 365 supports refreshing Power Pivot models against a lot of different data source types using the Power BI Gateway. The “new” version at PowerBI.com until recently only supported refresh of Power Pivot models and only against Azure and a few SaaS data sources.
The writing is on the wall that Designer will soon become the go to tool for development Power BI content. However, until today, Designer built models were not refreshable in PowerBI.com against any data sources. In the blog post today, Microsoft announced that Designer built models will now support refresh in PowerBI.com, however, similar to Power Pivot based models, on premise data sources are not supported… at least not yet.
The supported data sources are the following:
– Azure SQL Database.
– Azure Blob Storage.
– Azure Table Storage.
– Azure HDInsight.
– Azure Marketplace.
– Dynamics CRM Online.
– Facebook.
– Google Analytics.
– Salesforce Objects/Reports.
– OData feeds.
– Web (HTML & Web APIs).
I have not yet had a chance to test whether sourcing the Designer files from OneDrive allows them to be updated when the physical file is updated on OneDrive similar to how PowerPivot based models work, but I am assuming the behavior should be the same.
Please read the post here for more details: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2015/06/22/announcing-refresh-support-for-power-bi-designer-files-in-the-power-bi-service.aspx
business intelligist 