SSRS 2008 emailing Reports

Question

Was wondering if anyone could help me out. I have written a report in SSRS 2008. I would like to add a button or a link on the page that will email the currently run report. I know I can do this in subscription and set a schedule for this however the data needs to be checked before an email can be sent out.

Thanks for taking a look Rusty

Answer 1

Essentially what you want to do is put a mailto link on the page that generates an email when the user clicks on it. There is a component of the mailto link which will include an attachment. However, the attachment must be a locally housed file, it cannot be stored at a web address. See more here .

If the report you are running does not require many resources, you can set up a subscription which will, on a scheduled basis (say every 5 minutes), write the report to a file on a shared drive. Therefore, the report is constantly being written and updated at a local path. Then, you should be able to use the "&attachment=" portion of the mailto link to refer to this subscription-generated file sitting somewhere on a shared drive. This might not be a good option for you if you're counting on up-to-the-second data in this report you're generating. Then again, if you're having the report manually reviewed by human eyes, then that's probably not too much of an issue.

If you pursue this solution, it will be important to keep in mind that whatever shared drive you have your subscription write the file to will need to be accessible by anyone that will be clicking on that mailto link. It's not sufficient for you to have access to it. When that mailto link is clicked, it will use Windows authentication (or authentication from whatever system you're using) to connect to that shared drive and retrieve the file.

Best of luck!