Reporting Services

Reporting Services is a pretty feature rich tool for delivering reports to various consumers. There is plenty of power within Reporting Services (SSRS) giving one the ability to perform visualizations, render reports in various formats and even schedule reports to be delivered in different formats or on different schedules.

Unfortunately, the scheduling capability within SSRS is fairly weak. While it is true that one can accomplish a varied array of different schedules, the scheduling of SSRS is far below the power of SQL Agent (for instance).

I will explore the deficiency of the scheduling tool within SSRS in a very specific case. You may even be familiar with this deficiency already. Many organizations have the need to produce end of month reports that need to run on the last day of the month. If you are familiar with the scheduling tool within SSRS, you already know that this is not possible (at least through SSRS 2014). This article will help step you through how to schedule a report subscription to run on the last day of the month.

Schedule Options

Before diving into the custom schedules, let’s take a closer look at the options available for scheduling through SSRS.

While the tool does provide various options, the granularity certainly is not diverse enough to cover many legitimate scheduling needs – especially the “last day of month” requirement for many month end type of reports.

As you may be aware, SSRS subscriptions are actually run through the SQL Agent despite being set through SSRS. If I take a look at some of the scheduling options in SQL Agent, I can see the following.

Note here that there are various built-in options to schedule on a monthly basis, including the “last” option. If I wanted to look even closer at the available options I would see the following.

As you can see here, I can schedule for multiple different types of “last” options relative to the month. One of these options happens to be the last day. This helps to illustrate just how much more powerful and versatile the scheduling within SQL Agent is than what we get with the SSRS scheduler. All of this despite the fact that SSRS subscriptions are actually executed by the SQL Agent. Doesn’t that seem a bit odd?

Custom Schedule

Now that we better understand the limitations of the SSRS scheduler and given that SSRS subscriptions are executed through the SQL Agent, let’s move on to bigger, better and much more useful means of scheduling the SSRS reports.

The very first thing that you should do is to create a share schedule. This should be a shared schedule that is created as a run-once schedule. Let the schedule run that one time and then proceed on to the following steps. If you need help in creating a shared schedule, here is an msdn article. When you create the shared schedule, I recommend using a descriptive name that you can remember. This name will be useful in the next step. For the purposes of this article, my schedule is named “EndOfMonth”.

Once the schedule is created, the next thing to do is to query the ReportServer database. Make sure you know the name of your database. Some people have changed the ReportServer database name from the default. This is an important piece of information to remember. The query against the ReportServer database will be predominantly just to get the schedule id of the newly created schedule.

SELECT sch.scheduleid
, sub.Description
, sch.Name
FROM subscriptions sub
LEFT JOIN reportschedule rs
ON sub.subscriptionid = rs.subscriptionid
LEFT JOIN schedule sch
ON sch.scheduleid = rs.scheduleid
WHERE sch.Name = 'EndofMonth'
ORDER BY sub.modifieddate DESC;

When I run that query, I receive the following results.

I now want to take that scheduleid and then use it to determine what SQL Agent job is actually related to that schedule so I can fetch some info from the job. I could skip this entirely and go to the subsequent step but this helps to understand what needs to be done in that subsequent step. So, from here let’s query the msdb database in SQL Server to fetch some info from the job system.

SELECT j.name
, j.job_id
, js.step_name
, js.command
, sp.name AS JobOwner
FROM msdb.dbo.sysjobs j
INNER JOIN msdb.dbo.sysjobsteps js
ON j.job_id = js.job_id
INNER JOIN sys.server_principals sp
ON j.owner_sid = sp.sid
WHERE js.command LIKE '%219542cc-c1e8-4b42-889f-682d7276a07a%'
AND j.description like 'This job is owned by a report server process. %';

The scheduleid is used within a command within a jobstep. By passing the scheduleid into this query and then comparing against the existing job steps, I am able to retrieve the job that is related to the SSRS shared schedule (subscription). When I run the preceding query, I receive results illustrated in the following image.

Take note of the items I highlighted in red. Within the job name, step name and command text for the step, I can find the scheduleid for that shared schedule that I created. Yes, I could easily have changed the query I used to compare to the job name and that would have worked just fine in this case. By querying the command, I can confirm that the schedule is actually being used. The most important piece of information in this result is the entire command text for the job. I will need to take this command text and use it to populate a brand new SQL Agent job. This is how I will get my custom schedule for the SSRS subscription.

exec [ReportServer2012].dbo.AddEvent @EventType='SharedSchedule', @EventData='219542cc-c1e8-4b42-889f-682d7276a07a'

From here, I just need to create a SQL Agent job that uses the options for a monthly schedule indicating last day from the two drop down menus illustrated previously in this article. Then all that is left is a sigh of relief and a boom bada bing.

Recap

SSRS does not have the built-in capability for some of the more complex and often times regularly required report schedules to meet various business requirements. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can circumvent that short-coming and achieve the needed business requirements while looking like a hero to those that need the more advanced report schedules.