Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 27. Subscriptions and Data Alerts

Report Subscriptions and Delivery

A subscription is a schedule task to process or deliver a report at a specific time or in response to an event. Report subscriptions can be delivered in any supported file format as defined in the subscription. Rather than having users navigate to your reporting site to request a report on demand, subscriptions can be used to schedule and automate report delivery.

How Does It Work?

The report server has a scheduled job to process the report and then distribute the result via delivery extensions that are deployed on the server. Delivery extensions are an extensibility point where you can create your own; but out of the box, you can create subscriptions that send reports to a shared folder (UNC path) or to an email address. When the report server is configured for SharePoint integrated mode, as yours is or will be, you can also send a report to a SharePoint library on a schedule. Each delivery extension supports a number of delivery options that must be set up at the time that you schedule your delivery, such as the email address or SharePoint path you want the report sent to. This is powerful for business activities that require regular monitoring. We’ve seen this used to provide weeks of cost reports delivered on demand to a SharePoint library or application error reports delivered to the administration team.

To create a subscription, the report must store the credentials required to access the data source because ...