(Luke initially emailed me with the same question, to which I responded. But I wanted to be able to post the solution for everyone so I asked Luke to put the question as a comment to my article.)

Here’s what I answered:

1. To start, drag a Table from the Toolbox onto the report.
2. Now, drag ProductAlternateKey from the dataset into the Detail-level cell of the first column. Do the same for the EnglishProductName, but then into the second column.
3. Now set up grouping on the Detail level. One way to do that is through the Row Groups pane at the bottom of the Design window. At the moment it only shows one item called Details. Hit the small arrow to open up the context menu and select Group Properties. Click the Add button under the Group Expressions label and group on ProductAlternateKey. Close the properties window
4. Set up the third remaining column by selecting OrderQuantity from the left-click context menu. (That probably didn’t make much sense. When you hover the mouse pointer above the empty cell, you see a small icon of a table appear. Click that to get a list of all the fields in the dataset and select OrderQuantity.)

Grouping on the Detail level has now been set up completely. You can render the report to have a look at the current result. Next up is adding the group levels above the detail level.

1. With the table selected, we’ll again use the Row Groups pane. Click the dropdown to get the context menu and select Add Group > Parent Group. Choose the [EnglishProductSubcategoryName] field to group by and also activate the “Add group header” checkbox.
2. That will create a new column in front of the three we already set up. But that’s not what we want. So, right-click the grey top of the new column and choose Delete Columns.
3. In the new header row that’s currently empty, select the [EnglishProductSubcategoryName] field. To get the header to display over all three columns, you can select all three cells of the row, right-click and choose Merge Cells.

That’s one level of grouping added. To add the next one, the system is exactly the same. Only difference is that now you need to add a Parent Group to the “EnglishProductSubcategoryName” group in the Row Groups pane. And obviously you now need to group on [EnglishProductCategoryName].

Have fun, and thanks again for your question!
Valentino.

Thanks for a helpful post.

This question relates to your report layout rather than data sources…

In your first screenshot the groups are displayed on top of each other. That is, [EnglishProductCategoryName] is stacked on top of [EnglishProductSubcategoryName], which is stacked on top of the data row.

I’m using SSRS 2008 R2 and haven’t been able to replicate that, and it’s driving me nuts! The only way I can seem to organise the groups is by having a new column for each group, not a new row like yours.

Would you mind outlining please how you built the report layout in your screenshots above?

Many thanks in advance,
Luke.

I see what you mean, it looks indeed like this won’t be possible. The only way that I can think of to get this accomplished – and still use the lookup functions – is by somehow adding the different key values together into one concatenated value.

Thanks for your comment!
Valentino.

It seems as though only one level of lookup is supported.

How would I go about matching another key pair?