Question

We’re setting up a reporting service for a website, and right now I’m leaning towards using SSRS…but I’m trying to make sure it will really do everything we need. One thing we need is the ability for people, through the website, to create a report and have that report automatically sent out at various intervals. Sounds very much like SSRS Standard Report subscription.

But so far in MSDN, I’ve only been able to find how to subscribe to reports via tools like “Report Manager”, “Management Studio”. Obviously, if a user is going to subscribe via a website, they’re not going to have access to these…I need to be able to do this via an API. Haven’t been able to find a reference for this though. Does it exist?

Answer 1

Use data driven subscriptions:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms169673.aspx

They’re quite simple to setup, and all you need to do in your app is:

1. Configure a UI for your users to select the reports they would like to recieve (and time of day if desired)
2. Create a procedure that retrieves the subscriptions valid at a given time.
   
   –I run reports on an hourly basis, so my stored procedure takes a report Id and returns the email address of all recipients who requested a report on the day of the week and at the hour that this report is running.