Integrating drill-down capability so users can expand/collapse grouped records.

As I illustrated in my Nested Groups article, it’s important to provide grouping of records where such groups naturally exist within a dataset.

Equally important to the user will be their ability to expand/collapse those groups to conserve screen real estate when viewing large reports containing many pages of data.

To illustrate this capability, I’ll begin with a simple report containing two nested groups of records, the first group acts on similar Countries, then under that group records with like States are grouped together.

As you can see in Layout view, each group rests in its own row.

To enable a drill-down for the first group for States, I’ll select its Detail row (row below the Group header) and set the following properties: Visibility/Hidden: True, Visibility/Toggle Item: State.

Both of these properties tell the report engine to hide the records grouped by State and provide the user expand/collapse control using the plus/minus control.

As you can see, the State grouping is hidden until the user expands the records.

To provide the same control over the first Country grouping, repeat the same steps for that group’s Detail row.
Now, both groups’ records are hidden until the user expands their child records.