Visio Services refresh errors

I just wanted to drop a quick note to all of you who are publishing data connected diagrams to Visio Services…If at first you do not succeed verify your data connection via the client!

Some errors are fairly obvious as you can see by the error in the first screen shot below.  The key here is the text “a SharePoint list hosted on a domain you do not have access to”.

This error typically identifies that the published Visio diagram is hosted on a different SharePoint farm from the SharePoint list.  This is a limitation of Visio Services so make sure you publish your Visio diagrams to the same farm as the SharePoint list they are connected to.

I have also seen this error when the URL to the connected list is no longer valid, typically someone develops and publishes the Visio diagram on a test or dev farm and when it is all working they move the data and the diagram to the production farm, not realizing that they need to open the Visio diagram in the client and reconnect to the production SharePoint list as the URL is persisted in the Visio diagram.

The error in the second screen shot below may also be encountered for the same reason as explained above.

However as you can see this error is much less descriptive.