CHAPTER 10 MANAGING REPORTSTo verify that the subscription is working as anticipated, we made
[email protected] the sole recipient of the mail for testing. In Figure 10-20, you can see
standard e-mail options for To, Cc, Bcc, and Reply-To. In the To field, you add the recipient’s e-mail
address and then click OK to add the subscription. After you verify the subscription’s success, modify the
attributes of the subscription to add the real subscribers by navigating to the report in Report Manager,
selecting Subscriptions, and then selecting Edit.
Figure 10-20. Assigning recipients to subscriptions
Managing Data-Driven Subscriptions
Standard subscriptions address the needs of many companies that want to set up custom subscriptions
for both their employees and their customers. However, you can use another, much more flexible
method for delivering reports: the data-driven subscription. Data-driven subscriptions allow
administrators or content managers to query a data source—a SQL Server table, for example—to return
a list of subscribers that meets a specific set of criteria. This is the ideal way to deliver reports to a wide-
ranging list of subscribers. In addition, you have to manage only one subscription for all subscribers, and
those subscribers could have different parameters that are used to generate personalized reports.
We knew we would want to let our customers and their employees take advantage of data-driven
subscriptions, and fortunately we had long ago structured our application database to include employee
information that would be useful for just this purpose. By storing the employees’ e-mail addresses as
well as other data, such as geographical locations and certifications, we had all we needed to provide a
flexible delivery system, via e-mail, to traveling staff. The employees we initially targeted were clinicians
who had a daily schedule of patients to see. Most of the clinicians operated laptops or PDAs as part of
their daily routines.
Designing the Subscription Query
The first step was to redesign a report in SSRS so that it would provide clinical employees with their daily
schedules and parameterize it so that it would be employee-specific each time it was executed. As part of
the data-driven subscription, the report would be processed and delivered to employees as both an
embedded, printable format such as PDF or WORD, and as a link to connect to the SSRS report server if
they were online. Figure 10-21 shows the report we created, Daily Activity.