Lets say you have a single report that shows all your product departments and their corresponding managers. When the report is exported to Excel, every product department is placed in a separate worksheet (tab) and the tabs are named after the respective product manager. See the image below for illustration.

What if you wanted each Excel tab to be emailed separately to its corresponding manager while only running the report once?

remiCrystal Build 5045 has added a new feature called Excel Bursting. This feature is very similar to the existing PDF Bursting functionality that has been available in the software for a while.

Excel Bursting for SSRS reports allows you to split a single Excel Report so that each worksheet is placed into a separate file and then delivered to its corresponding recipient (in this case, the product manager).

Unlike SSRS’s native data-driven subscriptions where the report would need to be for each manager, Excel bursting is done by running the report only once!

Setting up Excel Bursting is achieved by simply adding a special Bursting Field to the SSRS report during design time and then getting remiCrystal read the field’s values at runtime.

To get started with Excel Bursting for SSRS Reports, take a look at this How-To article and then download remiCrystal for a free 14-day unlimited trial.

First what is a data-driven task? A remiCrystal data–driven task provides a way to use dynamic task data such as parameter values or email addresses that are retrieved from an external data source at run time. This data source can be your enterprise database, Excel workbook or even a CSV text file. 

In order to create a data-driven task, you must specify the data selection criteria using an SQL Query,  for example:

SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE Country = 'USA' AND City = 'Miami'

When the remiCrystal task runs, it will connect to the specified data source and use the above query to run the reports and deliver them for each record returned. 

The above works marvelously and will always run the reports for the specified criteria. What if, however, you wanted the “Country” and “City” values in the query to be populated from the command line?

First, let’s modify the query above so that it uses parameters instead of static values. We will call our parameters @country and @city and the query will now look like this:

SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE Country = '@country' AND City = '@city'

With this simple change saved, you can now pass in these parameter when executing the remiCrystal task from the command line using the following structure:

[path to remicrystal.exe] /ex "[path to remicrystal rctx task file]" /extdataparams "[pipe delimited key/value pairs of parameters]"

To put the above structure into practice, the command line looks like this:

"c:\program files (x86)\remiware\remicrystal\remicrystal.exe" /ex "c:\users\johndoe\documents\my remicrystal tasks\customer reports.rctx" /extdataparams "@country=usa|@city=new york"

Voila! When the above command is executed, the @country and @city parameters in our external data SQL Query will be replaced with USA and New York respectively.

As you can see, this feature is very useful for advanced users that would like to run one data-driven task and have the SQL Query customized based on command line arguments. 

Here are some scenarios when this feature can be used:

• limiting the data that the data-driven task can access based on the logged in ID of a user
• invoking a remiCrystal task from a website and passing the web session ID to remiCrystal
• having scripts (PowerShell, Batch file, SQL) that run a single data-driven task but each script is set to pass different parameter values
• invoking remiCrystal from your application where the parameter values are calculated using custom logic

To get started with this feature and more, download the free unlimited 14 day trial of remiCrystal today!