Folks, our customer needs a facility to generate reports via calendar schedules and then distribute them to lists of email recipients. For example, on the first of each month, monthly summary reports with filtering arguments for different customers and departments would be generated and each would be emailed to one or more related people. They currently do this by hand and it's a growing burden on the staff.
One of us discovered that SQL Server with Reporting Services <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159106.aspx> (SSRS) seems to do everything we need, so we upgraded to SQL Server Express with Advanced Tools (and reporting) and ran some experiments to make RDL server-side reports and use the web interface to publish and generate them. This all works, and we got excited, but then discovered that subscription reports <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms155911(v=sql.90).aspx> are not a part of SQL Express editions, so we don't get the facility to schedule and distribute reports unless our customer upgrades to the SQL Server Enterprise edition which is about $27000 per processor. So we have to tell the customer to buy SQL Server Enterprise and we learn how to use SSRS, or we find some other way of creating the subscription/schedule facility. Our current preference is for the latter if there is a way of programmatically generating the RDL reports stored on the server. If we can generate the reports, then we're quite happy to wrap it in a scheduler (NCron, Quartz .NET, etc) and it's easy to send email attachments. That way, SQL Server holds all the report definitions and data, and our code schedules and distributes the reports. Does anyone know if there is an API or service into SSRS to allow us to generate the RDL reports? Any other general comments on this matter would be welcome. Cheers, Greg
