SSRS – Subscriptions in pending status

I had some subscriptions staying in the “Pending” LastStatus. It took me a lot of time to fix this problem. This blog will give you the solution for the  problem.

This blog gives some information about troubleshooting subscriptions.  Unfortunately, no solution for my subscriptions that keeps hanging in “Pending” in the colum “LastStatus”. Reporting Services is a very nice tool but it can be hard to fix issues regarding custom made things like subscriptions 🙂

We have build a custom solution to bring subscriptions into the SSRS database. Users can configure all their subscriptions in the source applications and we push the data in the SSRS database. This worked fine till some subscriptions keep in the Pending status. After some investigation and trial/error, I found the solution.

Solution: there where some subscritpion with a “&” in the subject of the report. This is causing issue. The subscription dissappeared from the Report Manager screen but is in the database. This was caused by the “ExtensionSettings” column in the dbo.Subscriptions table.

This value doesn’t work, the & in in the subject:

<ParameterValues><ParameterValue><Name>TO</Name></Value></ParameterValue><ParameterValue><Name>IncludeReport</Name><Value>True</Value></ParameterValue><ParameterValue><Name>RenderFormat</Name><Value>PDF</Value></ParameterValue><ParameterValue><Name>Subject</Name><Value>Ministerie Veiligheid & Justitie – Plaatsingsduur met Klantstructuur – 15/10/2014</Value></ParameterValue><ParameterValue><Name>Comment</Name><Value>Hello this is a subscription</Value></ParameterValue><ParameterValue><Name>IncludeLink</Name><Value>False</Value></ParameterValue><ParameterValue><Name>Priority</Name><Value>NORMAL</Value></ParameterValue></ParameterValues>

I fixed this by replacing the & with the “&amp;”

<ParameterValues><ParameterValue><Name>TO</Name></Value></ParameterValue><ParameterValue><Name>IncludeReport</Name><Value>True</Value></ParameterValue><ParameterValue><Name>RenderFormat</Name><Value>PDF</Value></ParameterValue><ParameterValue><Name>Subject</Name><Value>Ministerie Veiligheid &amp; Justitie – Plaatsingsduur met Klantstructuur – 15/10/2014</Value></ParameterValue><ParameterValue><Name>Comment</Name><Value>Hello this is a subscription</Value></ParameterValue><ParameterValue><Name>IncludeLink</Name><Value>False</Value></ParameterValue><ParameterValue><Name>Priority</Name><Value>NORMAL</Value></ParameterValue></ParameterValues>

– Case closed. No more pending status in Reporting Services Subscriptions!