Reporting Services 2008 API

This afternoon I dug once again into the Reporting Services API for SSRS 2008 in SharePoint Integrated Mode. And boy, let me tell you, that is FUN. I've been working on integrating schedules and subscriptions into my application that are event-driven rather than schedule-driven.

Currently in Reporting Services 2008 you can set up a subscription and have it run at a particular interval (e.g. every morning at 8 am) and deliver a report to your inbox. If you then want to make sure all of these subscriptions fire off together and all change together (in case you need your subscriptions to run at 6 am instead of 8 am), you can create a shared schedule (let's call it "First Thing In The Morning") and associate all of your subscriptions with this shared schedule.

What you can't do easily is say "I want all of the subscriptions on this shared schedule to run right after my OLAP cube refreshes, no earlier and no later". At least not from the front end.

So we turn to the Web Service API built into Reporting Services.

The first nightmare is permissions. If you're calling a method like FireEvent, your calling identity needs to have the right permission on the Report Server. This was my three months ago headache. Apparently someone thought it was a good idea to remove the Permission notes from the SQL Server 2008 and 2005 Books Online. You can find it for SQL 2000, sure. But do you really want to hang your hat on that? No. Let's pull out Reflector.

And even after you find the right Reporting Services permission, you realize that this permission can't be configured because you're running in SharePoint Integrated Mode, which means that all reporting services permissions are now packaged up into corresponding SharePoint permissions (there's a really good reference for that here). This was my two months ago headache.

Today's headache came from trying to figure out how to locate a shared schedule and programmatically launch it. You can't. So here's how you work around it:

1) Call ListSchedules to get the set of all schedules on your site, each of which is associated with a GUID. Find the GUID for the schedule you want to fire off.
2) Call ListAllSubscriptions to get all the subscriptions on your site.
3) Loop through the subscriptions and for each one call GetSubscriptionProperties to get the MatchData property (which, incidentally, is the only missing property from your Subscription instance. How conveeenient). The MatchData property (string) will either be a GUID or an XML string. If it's a GUID and it matches the GUID from your schedule object, you know that the subscription belongs to that schedule object. Call FireEvent and pass in the subscription GUID to launch the subscription.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a ListAllSubscriptionsForSchedule method in the API?