HELP - Designing a Subscripion System for a Group of Reports

We're developing an ASP.NET 2.0 (C#) application that will act as a
front-end to SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. We have an interesting
requirement that [we believe] can't be solved using RS out-of-the-box. So,
I'm writing today to get some ideas on possible solutions.
The requirement is that the app. needs to support, what we're calling, a
report group. A report group is simply a group of similar reports that can
be executed as a single unit (instead of having to execute each report
individually). This was not too bad to solve. We simply created our own
database tables that track which report group contains which reports.
The tricky part is that we now have to figure out a way to create a
subscription that executes the report group (thereby executing each
individual report in the report group automatically). Creating a
subscription for a single report is fairly straightforward, but it appears
this concept of a report group is not a part of RS.
Does anyone out there have any good ideas/suggestions on how we can
implement such functionality?
The best thought we have so far is to write another application that manages
the execution of each report in a report group. So, the SQL Server 2005 job
would call this additional little application, this additional app. would
lookup which reports are in the report group, and then it would loop through
all the reports and execute them one-by-one. But, this has some issues-like
how do we handle the output type (PDF, Excel, etc.) and how do we handle the
destination (e-mail, printer, etc.) of each report. Plus, it seems like we
would be somewhat reinventing the wheel as far as subscriptions go.
Thanks.Why aren't you using one master report with all the other reports as
sub-reports?
Tom Bizannes
oiduts wrote:
> We're developing an ASP.NET 2.0 (C#) application that will act as a
> front-end to SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. We have an interesting
> requirement that [we believe] can't be solved using RS out-of-the-box. So,
> I'm writing today to get some ideas on possible solutions.
> The requirement is that the app. needs to support, what we're calling, a
> report group. A report group is simply a group of similar reports that can
> be executed as a single unit (instead of having to execute each report
> individually). This was not too bad to solve. We simply created our own
> database tables that track which report group contains which reports.
> The tricky part is that we now have to figure out a way to create a
> subscription that executes the report group (thereby executing each
> individual report in the report group automatically). Creating a
> subscription for a single report is fairly straightforward, but it appears
> this concept of a report group is not a part of RS.
> Does anyone out there have any good ideas/suggestions on how we can
> implement such functionality?
> The best thought we have so far is to write another application that manages
> the execution of each report in a report group. So, the SQL Server 2005 job
> would call this additional little application, this additional app. would
> lookup which reports are in the report group, and then it would loop through
> all the reports and execute them one-by-one. But, this has some issues-like
> how do we handle the output type (PDF, Excel, etc.) and how do we handle the
> destination (e-mail, printer, etc.) of each report. Plus, it seems like we
> would be somewhat reinventing the wheel as far as subscriptions go.
> Thanks.|||You could try setting up a shared schedule. It would still require
individual subscriptions for each report but they would all start
firing at the same scheduled time.