Reporting Services and Subscriptions - Stop Sending Empty Report

  • We have a report that runs on a nightly basis that gets emailed out via subscription when the report is run. However, when there is no data in the report, it emails a blank report. We would not like for empty reports to be emailed out. Does anyone have a way to fix this?

    Thanks,

    Jared

    Jared
    CE - Microsoft

  • If its a job please try msdb.sp_send_dbmail

  • There is no really good way to do this. Anyway you do it is a bit of a hack. The way I have done it is to create a sql agent job that checks for the existence of data for the report then us sp_start_job to fire off the job created by SSRS for the subscription if data exists. Like I said it's a hack, but it works.

  • I maybe a little bit late with this reaction, but you might find this link rather useful:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/bimusings/archive/2005/07/29/445080.aspx

    [font="Verdana"]Markus Bohse[/font]

  • MarkusB (7/27/2009)


    I maybe a little bit late with this reaction, but you might find this link rather useful:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/bimusings/archive/2005/07/29/445080.aspx

    It's never too late to provide a good resource, thanks Markus. Make sure you read the comments on that link as well as there are some good ideas there are well.

  • MarkusB (7/27/2009)


    I maybe a little bit late with this reaction, but you might find this link rather useful:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/bimusings/archive/2005/07/29/445080.aspx

    Great link!

    We have Data Driven subscriptions, with a master list of subscripbers, and another table for each report, with comments, parameters, etc.. Joined together, they make 'the list' for any scheduled subscription. We have a flag on the master list (Y/N) used to disable all subscriptions for a user. I could see adding a similar flag to the report table. Since most of our reporting is weekly, a job could easily be scheduled to update the flag prior to the scheduled run.

    The one issue I see - if a blank report is sent, when you do have an issue, the user is likely to ask 'where is my report'. If it comes sporadically, you may not know you are having problems.

    Greg E

  • We have a report in Reporting Services. According to results it returns we want to manage recipients.

    The problem is that Reporting Services generates a list of subscribers (recipients) BEFORE the actual procedure run. If we could change the sequence of those steps we could easily solve all issues (and many others) with empty reports are being sent to our subscribers (we could dynamically remove all unnecessary addresses from subscriptions).

    Basically, it’s a kind of monitoring system which should be triggered every 1-2 mins. Report contain accounts, managers of those accounts and income those accounts make to us. If income goes below specific level it should be notified to that account manager.. We want to use Reporting Services subscriptions for this task (we want to attach Excel spreadsheet into e-mails and send this e-mail to account manager).

    Any ideas how it can be solved?

    thanks

  • I got this to work by combining a few suggestions. I did not like the idea of hacking the Reporting Services tables, or subverting the normal scheduling. The suggestion to throw an error seemed the best, but did not make sense. Finally, I was able to create a stored procedure with a parameter that said whether to allow for an empty result set or not. Example:

    CREATE PROCEDURE usp_getReportData @StartDate DATETIME = null, @EndDate DATETIME = null, @AllowEmptyReturn BIT = 1

    AS

    BEGIN

    IF NOT Exists(SELECT TOP 1Data1, Data2 FROM DataTable

    WHERE Data2 BETWEEN @StartDate AND @EndDate)

    AND @AllowEmptyReturn = 0

    BEGIN

    RAISERROR ('No Records Found',16,1)

    END

    ELSE

    BEGIN

    SELECT Data1, Data2 FROM DataTable

    WHERE Data2 BETWEEN @StartDate AND @EndDate

    END

    END

  • If for some reason you're unable to add/modify the dataset's stored procedure, you can add an additional dataset with the "IF" statement to throw the error. The effect appears to be the same.

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