Only emailing a spreadsheet when it contains data.

This was a new one to me! A user subscribed to an SSRS Report but only wanted to receive the email if the report contained data.

There seems to be loads of write-ups on the web about how to set this up. Here is how it went for me …

Firstly, I created the stored-procedure that would return rows from a live table that contained (business logic) errors (EG: “rep_exceptions”).

I created the report and subscribed to it (making sure to paste in my actual email address, not my login).

In the subscription form I specified both a start-date and an end-date that were in the past (ensuring the subscription would never actually fire, and ‘OK’ed the form.

Within SSMS “Job Activity Monitor” I located the job that had been created by this subscription (I looked for jobs that had never run, and then matched the start / end dates in the schedule with those I used in the subscription-form)

I copied the action statement from the job-step eg:

EXECUTE [ReportServer].dbo.AddEvent @EventType='TimedSubscription', @EventData='5ec60080-b30c-4cfc-8571-19c4ba59aaac'

… into a new job. Then augmented it, to only run if there was data …

EXECUTE [ServerName].[dbo].[rep_exceptions]

if @@ROWCOUNT > 0

EXECUTE [ReportServer].dbo.AddEvent @EventType='TimedSubscription', @EventData='5ec60080-b30c-4cfc-8571-19c4ba59aaac'

I scheduled the new-job to run every 8am.

Once this was all tested and working – I changed the SSRS subscription email address to the user (and left me as CC temporarily).