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Tutorial: Creating a Data-Driven Subscription

Reporting Services provides data-driven subscriptions so that you can customize the distribution of a report based on dynamic subscriber data. Data-driven subscriptions are intended for the following kinds of scenarios:

  • Distributing reports to a large recipient pool whose membership may change from one distribution to the next. For example, distribute a monthly report to all current customers.

  • Distributing reports to a specific group of recipients based on predefined criteria. For example, send a sales performance report to the top ten sales managers in an organization.

What You Will Learn

This tutorial shows you how to use data-driven subscriptions using a simple example to illustrate the concepts.

This tutorial is divided into three lessons:

Requirements

Data-driven subscriptions are typically created and maintained by report server administrators. The ability to create data-driven subscriptions requires expertise in building queries, knowledge of data sources that contain subscriber data, and elevated permissions on a report server.

Your system must have the following installed to use this tutorial:

  • The Evaluation, Developer, or Enterprise edition of SQL Server. Support for data-driven subscriptions is not available in Standard, Workgroup, or SQL Server Express.

  • The report server must be running in native mode.

  • SQL Server Agent service must be running.

  • A report that includes parameters. This tutorial assumes the sample report, Employee Sales Summary. This report is included in the AdventureWorks sample reports. To define a data-driven subscription for this report, the report must be configured to use stored credentials when accessing its data source.

    Tip

    The easiest way to publish all of the sample reports to a report server is to deploy the report sample solution (AdventureWorks Sample Reports.sln) from Business Intelligence Development Studio. For more information, see How to: Publish Report Samples.

  • The AdventureWorks sample database, which provides data to the sample report.

  • A role assignment that includes the Manage all subscriptions task on the sample report. This task is required for defining a data-driven subscription. If you are an administrator on the computer, the default role assignment for local administrators provides the permissions necessary for creating data-driven subscriptions. For more information, see Granting Permissions on a Native Mode Report Server.

  • A shared folder for which you have write permissions. The shared folder must be accessible over a network connection. For more information, see How to: Create a Shared Folder for Report Server File Share Delivery.

Estimated time to complete the tutorial: 30 minutes

Note

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