Apologies if this is not the appropriate category for this question… Happy to repost in a different one or elsewhere.
Is it possible to develop in Power BI Desktop when working offline from the datasource? Here’s my scenario.
I have a client who cannot provide VPN access to the db server so I set up a local instance of MSSQL on my laptop, created a server alias so that I could dev remotely but not have to change the connection in the report back and forth between my host name and that of the db server. All good until I reinstalled the OS.
The short answer is yes. You can create Dev, Test and Prod parameters and assign the respective Data Source details to these parameters . You can then toggle between Dev (data source in local system), Test (Data Source in your PowerBI, OneDrive or dedicated Server on the intranet) and Prod (data source in client system), either on PBI desktop or on Power BI Service after publishing the dataset.
Also, once you initially connect to the data source and import the data to the data model, you no longer need to be connected to the data source during the development cycle. You only need to re-connect to the data source if you want to refresh the data model with additional or most recent data.
