Occasionally your Salesforce widgets may get stuck showing the error message we were unable to build your widget. This can be caused by a bug in Salesforce’s API, which prevents us from fetching your data.
While we’re unable to fix this issue, there are several ways to get your widgets working again. First, try re-saving your report in Salesforce, then edit an affected widget and wait for it to load.
If the issue persists, try using a different Salesforce user account to connect to the report in Geckoboard.
If you don't have another Salesforce account, try either:
Cloning your report. Then changing parameters and its filename to make the report unique.
Changing the format of your report (formats include tabular, summary, matrix and joined). Then return the format back to its original format.
For both methods, save the report, then edit an affected widget and wait for it to load.
If you continue to experience this error, get in touch. We should be able to give you the exact name of the report affected.
Why is this happening?
Geckoboard retrieves data from reports you've built using Salesforce's REST Analytics API.
Due to the length of time it takes to run some of our customers’ reports we use the asynchronous method of execution. We first issue a request to begin the execution of a report, which returns to us an instance identifier. Next we poll the API with the given identifier until the instance’s status is either “Success” (and results are available) or “Error”.
Historically, we’ve seen occasions where report-instances seem to be “stuck” and their status is perpetually “New” or “Running” no matter how long ago we started the execution of a report.
Attempting to re-run the report by issuing another request doesn't help, and in fact returns the same instance identifier.
We've reported this to Salesforce and we'll continue to work with them to help them fix the issue permanently at their end and prevent this from happening in the future.