CHAPTER 10 MANAGING REPORTS
Managing Content
Effective management of content on the SSRS report server requires that you be familiar with the
management tasks available. Several aspects of report management are available only after the report
has been deployed. We’ll cover each aspect in detail as we show how to deploy the health care reports
for selected users:- Shared schedules
- Report parameters and data sources
- Report snapshots, history, and caching
- Subscriptions
For each content management task, we’ll provide specific real-world scenarios, continuing with the
health care agencies as an example. Up to this point, you have deployed several reports, data sources,
and other report items, such as graphic images and code, which you have developed throughout the
book. Now it’s time to put on your administrator’s cap and take advantage of all the features that make
SSRS a unique and powerful report-delivery system as well as one that provides a rich report-authoring
environment.Setting Up Shared Schedules
Generally speaking, a shared schedule is like a shared data source in that it is available system-wide to
users who have permission to access it. You can create a shared schedule specifically for a certain job
type. It is possible to configure a recurring shared schedule to execute by the hour, day, month, and
week or to run only once. In this example, the financial reports will execute at the end of each month. It
is important that a history be maintained for these reports so that you can freeze the values at any point
in time or use them for auditing capabilities, such as understanding which users viewed a report and
what they saw in the report.
You’ll create a shared schedule that will be used to run the financial reports on the last day of each
month to provide the following benefits:- You can schedule the reports to execute at a predetermined time.
- You can store a snapshot of each report to maintain a historical perspective of the
data.
Note Report snapshots are reports that are executed at a specific time, either when initiated by a user or as
part of a schedule, and that collectively make up the report history. We’ll cover snapshots in more detail later.One financial report that customers might run at the end of the month is an AR Reconciliation
report. This report lists financial transactions that occurred during the current accounting period, such
as 10-2009 for October 2009. This report may be one of several that need to execute on the same
schedule. Other financial reports might include an Aged Trial Balance report and an AR Aging report.
We’ll use the AR Reconciliation report in the following section to show the management tasks associated
with setting up shared schedules and creating report snapshots. We’ve included the AR Reconciliation