Last weekend i was at the dutch SQLZaterdag (SQLSaturday) where I attendend a session from Hans Geurtsen who showed us the new features of Reporting services 2008 R2. Among others he showed us the new Group Domain Scope property to align columns, i just had to find out how this works. I knew of a excelent blog post by Sean Boon where he used the Domain scope property to align the axis of a sparkleline.
Ok what is the problem, lets say we have a few tablixes with sales per month, not every year has sales for all months, this would result in the following report:
What we would like to do is align the months so each month will be shown at each tablix, i designed the report to place the Tablix within a list.
I named the parent list “Maintablix”, the Group Domain Scope needs to have a scope to sync the axes against. You cannot just add tablixes and sync them, you need to have one parent tablix to sync your child tablixes against. When you create a report like this you can add the parent tablix name to the DomainScope property to your column properties of the child tablix:
this will result in the following report, as you can see the columns are now aligned:
This is a pretty nice feature that could prove very handy, but what I really would like to see to sync axis over multiple tablixes, i couldn’t get that to work and i don’t think that is possible.