SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - Suppress empty reports

[TomKane]

Hi,

I have a question about "SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - Suppress empty reports" and would appreciate any advice that you might have on the matter.

We are building a set of exception reports that we are hoping will only be mailed to subscribers on the condition that the report is not empty.

I have done some searching on the web and it would appear that this is not possible although there could be a work around involving data driven subscriptions (described at the end of this post).

I was wondering if anyone had come across this before and hoy they got around it.

Thanks in advance,
Tom

You can force a workaround using a data-driven subscription: when you create the subscription, you have to specify a list of recipients. Here you can use a query which is an inner join of your list of recipients with your data from the report (distinct on recipients) - like this, your list of recipients will be empty if there's no data for the report, and no mails will be sent.

 

[bustercoder]

Tom,

Have you been able to arrive at a solution? I've had the same issue.

Thanks,
Buster

 

[TomKane]

Buster,

Not exactly. What we ended up doing was developing a summary report that manipulated the catalog and execution log within the ReportServer database.

The majority of reports we write are for exceptions and so people can check out the summary report and then if the count of records returned for a given report is not zero then they can go to the report and action it.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Tom