Question

Disclaimer: I’m an SSRS n00b, so not too many rotten tomatoes please 🙂

I have a hierarchy of employees and managers which I had Reporting Services build using the Recursive Parent property. Here’s a crude representation:

-Jim Bob
   Ray
  -Steve
     Ricky Bobby
     Terry

For example, I need a count of the people under Steve, but when I call Count(Fields!EmployeeID.Value, "Details", Recursive) I get 3 instead of 2. Of course, I can just subtract 1 in the case of a count, but this won’t work when I need a sum. So the real question is how do I get a recursive aggregate that excludes the parent?

Additional info: I only have one group which is the default Details group. It’s set up just like this example, so I’m grouping by EmployeeID and I have the recursive parent set to ManagerID.

---

Update

A few workarounds I’ve tried to no avail:

• Adding a row inside the group – yields the same results because it’s still in the same scope as the other detail row.
• Adding a subtotal – doesn’t work because it’s outside the details group so it only renders once instead of once per manager.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You could consider a couple of things.

1) you could provide counts in the SQL query that supplies the report, and then simply report it for each group using

      =FIRST(Fields!FieldThatHasCount.Value).

2) You may be able to use your report’s code block to iteratively call a function, upping the count on a shared variable or doing some sort of arithmatic between parent sections and child sections to reflect the count when your report is presented. I know I have run into complications with this approach depending on SSRS version and to the level of complexity, nesting, subreports etc., in your report.