Subscription Management Architecture

To send notifications, a Notification Services application must have information about subscribers, the information that the subscribers are interested in, and information about where to send the information. Subscription management is the process of managing this subscriber, subscription, and subscriber device data.

Subscription Management Interfaces

Subscription management is performed by custom subscription management interfaces. These interfaces, which can be Web applications, Microsoft Windows applications, console applications, or stored procedures, manage the subscriber, subscriber device, and subscription data in the instance and application databases.

Notification Services provides subscription management objects and views to simplify the interface development process. For more information about subscription management objects, including code samples, see Developing Subscription Management Interfaces.

The following illustration shows how subscription management objects are used by a subscription management interface to communicate with Notification Services.

Notification Services stores the subscriber and subscriber device data with Notification Services instance data, and it stores subscription data with application data. This storage method lets applications share the subscriber data between applications while separately storing subscriptions for each application. This is desirable for many applications because it reduces redundant data and makes subscriber data easier to maintain. However, if you do not want to share subscriber data between applications, you can place each application in its own instance of Notification Services.

When a Notification Services application is running, applications typically use the subscription data to generate notifications, and then use the subscriber and subscriber device data to format and distribute the notifications.

Important

When the application generates notifications, each notification must contain information about the destination subscriber device. The subscriber device for the notification must match a subscriber device that is configured for the subscriber. Otherwise, the notification will not be delivered.

Subscription Management Views

When you create a Notification Services instance, Notification Services adds three views that you can use to manage subscriber, subscriber device, and subscription data:

• You can use NSSubscriberView, which is in the instance database and schema, to add, modify, and delete subscriber data.
• You can use NSSubscriberDeviceView, which is in the instance database and schema, to add, modify, and delete subscriber devices.
• You can use NSSubscriptionClassNameView, which is in the application database and schema, to view to add, modify, and delete parameter-based, event-driven subscriptions. You cannot use this view to manage condition-based subscriptions and scheduled subscriptions.

See Also

Concepts

Event Collection Architecture
Subscription Processing Architecture
Notification Formatting and Delivery Architecture

Other Resources

Notification Services Views
Developing Subscription Management Interfaces

Help and Information

Getting SQL Server 2005 Assistance

Change History

Release	History
17 July 2006	Added content: Added clarification about benefits of sharing subscriber data and the option to use separate instances so that the data is not shared.
14 April 2006	Added content: Added information about how views cannot be used to manage scheduled subscriptions. Changed content: Revised Subscription Management Interfaces section by adding a link to development content, and by adding stored procedures as an interface type.