Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Reporting Services Step by Step

Developing Expressions for Hierarchical Data

Hierarchical data comes from a table with a self-referencing join, which is sometimes referred to as a parent-child table. You can recognize a table of hierarchical data by the presence of a foreign key column with a relationship to a primary key column in the same table. This type of data structure is useful when multiple levels of data exist, such as you might find in an organizational chart of employees, but a different number of levels exist in each branch from the top of the hierarchy.

Reporting Services allows you to create a group to organize rows into hierarchical levels as defined by the foreign key relationships. A special function is available to show the level of a row within the hierarchy, ...