Dataflows within Power Apps are an impressive tool that has seen a lot of investments by Microsoft recently. Designed to allow you to integrate your data into Microsoft Dataverse using Power Query (M) capability, they are a far cry from the traditional data import experience inherited from Dynamics 365 Online. I first took a look at them in 2019 and, initially, hit a fair few issues when trying to get them to work. Fast forward to 2021 and, not only has the interface seen a revamp, but they now also feel a lot more stable and capable. So, if you find yourself grappling with an elaborate data import routine and you’re tempted to consider tools such as Azure Data Factory or Kingswaysoft, then you owe it yourself to at least explore dataflows. Of course, as with anything to do with a continually evolving, Software as a Service (SaaS) offering such as the Power Platform, you may invariably hit a small issue or two as you go into the woods with it. 😉

Case in point - when recently attempting to import the results of a query into the Dataverse, I kept getting the following error message:

Error Code: Canceled, Error Details: The refresh for this entity was canceled. A task was canceled.

The query loaded fine without errors, and there appeared to be nothing amiss with the mappings. Upon further investigation/research, I stumbled upon this forum post dating back to 2019 and the following, suggested answer:

If you wish to overcome it immediately you can rename your entities so they include only letters, numbers and spaces (no special characters) and also verify they don’t start with a number.

In my case, the affected query contained the & symbol in its name. Upon removing this and re-running the dataflow again, it completed successfully.

As the forum post seems to suggest, the product team seem to be aware of this issue and are working on a fix…but, after two years, I’m guessing it must be stuck within a pull request somewhere internally. 😏 Hopefully, if you find yourself hitting the same problem now or in the future, you know what you need to do to get things working again.