I am trying to create a report where, as an example, it would look like:

I have been able to get this to work with subreports however there are two problems with this approach:
- Subreports are extremely inefficient. They make a call to the database for every row and column for each of the subreports in Books, Stories and Articles.
- When used within CRM 2011, you can only have one parent report per subreport which precludes being able to reuse subreports. I have a Landscape and Portrait version of the same report (landscape has additional columns) and I would like to reuse the same subreports but this seems to be unsupported.
My question is whether I could craft a large dataset which contains all the joined properties and then nest a table within a parent table and use filters to only display the correct data within each cell. To put it another way, the parent Table would have the Authors Name and Email, then there would be 3 sub tables, one in Books, stories and Articles.
I have tried putting in a filter into the sub-tables but I get an error saying:
The definition of the report ‘/ReportName’ is invalid
The tablix ‘tablix3’ has a detail member with inner members. Detail members can only contain static inner members…
This makes no sense to me because the ’email’ Field is an inner member and it is not static. Anyone out there know how I should better approach this? Just to pre-empt the response “Change the design of the report”, I can’t. This is how the users want to see the data. I will accept answers which keep this layout but change the underlying implementation, but not answers along the lines of “make 3 separate reports”.
If your question is – can you nest one table inside another one and filter the nested table, the answer is yes. I have successfully done this.
If you are having a problem, there must be something else about your design that is causing the problem or there is something different about our environments. What version of SSRS are you using? Can you be more specific about your layout? For example, are you using a table or a matrix or a list to start? What steps are you using to insert the nested item? What kind of grouping do you have on the outermost item? The child item? Have you tried this with just one nested item to start?