With the drill-down feature, you can temporarily hide a part of your report. That hidden part can be controls, groups, columns or rows. When you open a drill-down report, part of the data is hidden so that you can only see high-level data until you request for more detail. In such reports you find an expand icon (plus-sign image) next to the toggle item in the report. Clicking the toggle image, or plus sign, expands hidden content into view and the expand icon changes to a collapse icon (minus-sign). When you click the minus-sign image, it hides the content and returns the report to its previous state.

To create a drill-down report, use the Visibility properties of controls, groups, columns, or rows. Simply set the Visibility-hidden property to True and set the toggle item to the name of another item in the report, usually a text box in the group containing the hidden item. At run time, this puts a plus sign next to the toggle item which the user can click to display the hidden data.

If you export a drill-down report, any content which is hidden at the time of export remains hidden in the exported file. If you want all of the content to appear in the exported file, you must first expand all hidden data.

Create Drill-Down Report

In a Page report, you can set up data regions, report controls, table rows, and tablix row and column groups to collapse, so that users can drill down into the data they choose to view.

In order to collapse an item, you use the Visibility settings available in the Properties Panel or in the control dialog. You set the initial visibility of the report controls to Hidden and allow the user to toggle them by clicking other report controls (usually a TextBox).

When the report is initially displayed at run-time, the toggle items display with plus sign icons that you can click to display the detail data. Follow these steps to set a drill-down link.

1. Drag and drop a TextBox control and a Table data region onto the report design surface.
2. Place the TextBox control such that it appears as a header on your report.
3. From the Report Explorer, expand your data set and drag fields and place them inside the detail row of the Table data region. Expressions for these fields appear in the detail row, and labels appear in the table header row.
4. With the Table data region selected on the design surface, under the Properties window, click the Property dialog link to open the respective control's dialog.
5. In the Table dialog that appears, go to the Visibility page, change the Initial visibility to Hidden, and select the checkbox next to Visibility can be toggled by another report item.
6. From the drop-down list that appears, select the TextBox that you added in step 1. The TextBox is now used to toggle items in the Table and show detail data.
7. Click OK to save the changes.
8. When you view the report, the Textbox displays an Expand/Collapse icon to its left.
     
9. Click the Expand/Collapse icon to view the hidden data.