Creating reports with nested data regions

In the previous recipe, we used the concept of multiple data regions to display both a graph and a detailed text report in the same report body. Sometimes you would like to be able to provide the users with the at a glance information provided by a chart, but not have a chart tool because it takes up much of the report area. In other words, you'd like to embed a chart within the main body of your text.

SSRS allows you to accomplish this through the concept of nested data regions. In this recipe, we'll see how to create a matrix report and then add a sparkline graph to it in order to show the trending of sales totals for a specific sales territory over time.

Getting ready

For this report, we'll use the report wizard to quickly generate a report with a matrix. We'll then modify the report to add a new column, in which we'll embed our sparkline. A sparkline is a tiny chart that is embedded within tables and matrixes.

Naturally we'll need data. We'll use...