KB33212: There is no option to disable MicroStrategy 2021 Distribution Services subscriptions as an Administrator.

Symptom

When troubleshooting issues in Strategy 2021 Distribution Services, there may be a situation where a subscription or set of subscriptions will need to be temporarily disabled. However, in Strategy Developer, the only option when right-clicking on the subscription is to unsubscribe it. Choosing to unsubscribe the subscription will remove it permanently.

Action

While individual subscriptions cannot be temporarily disabled, it is possible to temporarily disable the Strategy scheduler. The Distribution Services subscriptions will not run when the scheduler is disabled. The scheduler can be disabled by navigating to 'Configure Intelligence Server' in Developer and selecting Server Definition > Advanced. Here there will be an option a check box for "use Strategy Scheduler". To disable the scheduler, un-check the following option:

Workaround

The following workaround can be used to temporarily disable individual subscriptions rather than disabling the Strategy scheduler. One way to simulate a subscription being disabled is to expire the subscription. Expiring the subscription will stop it from running on the Strategy Intelligence Server, but will keep it available for modification later. The subscription will still appear in the Subscriptions Manager in Developer.
Users can 'expire' their own individual subscriptions by navigating to 'My Subscriptions' in Strategy Web, editing their subscription, enabling the setting 'do not deliver after' and setting this to the current date. This will stop the subscription from delivering until the 'do not deliver after' setting is disabled. 

If the Administrator has a requirement to expire individual subscriptions that are owned by other users, the following instructions can be followed:
Cache Update, Mobile, and History List Subscriptions
Cache Update, Mobile, and History List subscriptions can be individually expired using Strategy Developer.

1. Browse to the Subscriptions manager in Strategy Developer and edit the subscription.
2. Check 'Expire subscription on' and set the expiration to the current date. Click 'OK' to save.
   To later re-enable the subscription, edit it and un-check 'Expire subscription on'.
   

Email and File Subscriptions
Email and File Subscriptions cannot be created or edited using Strategy Developer. This means that the Administrator will not be able to directly modify the subscriptions to set them as expired. These types of subscriptions will need to be expired using Command Manager using the steps below.

1. Open Strategy Command Manager and connect to the correct project source.
2. If necessary, run the following command to list all the properties for the subscription
   
   

   
   LIST ALL PROPERTIES FOR SUBSCRIPTION "TestSubscription" FOR PROJECT "Strategy Tutorial";

   
   
   It will be seen that by default, there is no expiration date set for the subscription. 
   
3. Run the alter subscription command to set the expiration date for the desired subscription(s) to the current date.
   Example:
   
   
   

   
   ALTER EMAILSUBSCRIPTION "TestSubscription" EXPIRATIONDATE 9/17/2018 IN PROJECT "Strategy Tutorial";

   
   
   
   
   Make sure to set the value for EXPIRATIONDATE to the current date and not an earlier date. Providing an earlier date will cause the command to fail with the following error message:
   

The expiration date can't be earlier than today.

1. Open Strategy Command Manager and connect to the project source
2. Run the alter subscription command to set the subscription to an expiration date far into the future. 

Example:

ALTER EMAILSUBSCRIPTION "TestSubscription" EXPIRATIONDATE 9/17/3000 IN PROJECT "Strategy Tutorial";