A Parent-child hierarchy is one example of this: When you browse Parent-child hierarchy from an Analysis Services cube with Excel, Excel automatically displays it with nice drill-down functionality.

But when you add it to a Reporting Services report, you get something like this:

That’s not how we like to display a Parent-Child hierarchy to our users!

To display it with the expected drill-down you need to do some extra configuration:

The following example uses the AdventureWorks example cube available on CodePlex:

Create a new report and add a dataset with the following MDX query:

SELECT NON EMPTY { [Measures].[Amount] } ON COLUMNS,

NON EMPTY { (DESCENDANTS([Organization].[Organizations].[Organization Level 01].ALLMEMBERS) ) }

DIMENSION PROPERTIES MEMBER_CAPTION, MEMBER_UNIQUE_NAME, PARENT_UNIQUE_NAME,

LEVEL_NUMBER ON ROWS

FROM [Adventure Works]

CELL PROPERTIES VALUE, BACK_COLOR, FORE_COLOR, FORMATTED_VALUE, FORMAT_STRING,

FONT_NAME, FONT_SIZE, FONT_FLAGS

Add a Tablix to your report and drag the parent-child hierarchy “Organizations” en the fact “Amount” to the Detail Row of the Tablix.

To enable drill-down you need to edit the Group Properties of the Row Group:

Configure the group to iterate on the UniqueName of “Organizations”:

Go to the Advanced options and set the property “Recursive Parent” to the ParentUniqueName of “Organizations”.

Change the visibility of this Group to “Hide” and check the option “Display can be toggled by this report item”. The toggle item should be the Textbox containing the Parent-Child hierarchy.

Now optimize the layout by increasing the indent for the lower levels of the hierarchy:

In the Textbox properties: set the following expression for “Padding – Left”:

=Cstr(Fields!Organizations.LevelNumber * 10) & “pt”

Click Preview to test the report.

Look’s way better isn’t it?

When they want to add a property of a specific attribute, they just check this item in the field list. By using it this way, you’re kind of building hierarchies between all the selected attributes, therefore all possible relationships must be checked. This of course has a huge performance impact.

There is an easier and better way that also makes loading the data a lot faster: Member Properties. The relationships between Members and their Properties is defined by specifying Attribute Relationships in Analysis Services.

Ever saw that Tooltip in Excel when you’re hovering your mouse over a field in the Pivot Table? This Tooltip shows all available Member Properties.

But you can also display them on columns:

Click right on the field where you would like to display one or more properties for. Under “Show Properties in Report”, select the properties you would like to show.

By using Member Properties the layout will be better and your report will load a lot faster!

Using Attributes:

Using Properties: