Trigger TimedSubscription programmatically

Hello,

Subscriptions are a way to kickstart Reporting Service in delivering a report to somewhere instead of you asking for the report through a URL access request (portal or custom app). This is also callled push versus pull.

You can configere a timed event to trigger off those kind of subscriptions. But in some occasions you want some "custom" event to trigger of a subscription. You can not configure something like that through the configuration tools (reportmanger or SqlServer Management Studio).

Lukasz Pawlowski (http://blogs.msdn.com/lukaszp/archive/2005/10/07/478391.aspx) explained a way to tell Reporting Services to kick of a subscription with the SOAP API of Reporting Services. There is a method called FireEvent that can trigger the subscription. Lukasz suggests creating a dummy schedule that is will never run because it's configured in the passed. The report subscription you want to launch uses this dummy schedule. In a program you call the Firevent method on the reporting WebService .... and your report is delivered as you specifed it in your subscription.

I will show some screenshots how I did it, following Lukasz's tips.

So this is the report I want to be delivered on a file share in PDF.

First I make a dummy shared schedule. But one that will never fire a time event.

Now I create a new subscription on the report I showed before. It will use the shared schedule as Time Event generator.

In order to launch this subscription I must simulate a time event. The SOAP API of Reporting Services just gives me that.

This is a code snippet in VB.NET 2005 of how you could just do that.

It is important that you use the ID (ie. GUID) to specify the subscription. You can also look it up in the Subscription table of the reportserver database.

But before you go off and launch this code one thing is left to be configured (besides the folder share of course) . The account under which this program must execute will need "generate event" privilege on Reporting Service level. Because this is a single machine demo setup (november 07 CTP of Rosario). The user tfssetup is also as system admin on RS. So i just checked the checkbox for generating events on the RS syst. admin role .

The code snippet you just so will actually write an entry in the reportserver.Event table. The RS service will pick it up and act upon it. In our example it will write a pdf file into the file share folder (on the local disk ).

Have fun.

Best regards,

Alexander