Thread: Introducing the 'Tablix'

Earlier versions of Reporting Services had two controls - called the Table and the Matrix. The Table was a generic tab¬ular data display control where the columns, where fixed by the rows, would grow depending on the data itself. The Matrix on the other hand allowed for both dynamic columns and dynamic rows - akin to a PivotTable in Excel.

SQL 2008 Reporting Services has a new control called the Tablix. This a combination of the Table and Matrix controls that now allows you to create certain types of reports that were impos¬sible to do earlier due to the nature of the earlier controls. Take a look at the two examples shown here.



The first contains an example of a matrix and a table. The table has a static column. However combining both of them was not possible earlier. Using the Tablix however, it is easy to combine dy¬namic and static columns into the same tabular format.
The second example contains two matrices each having dynamic columns. We can now combine both these sets of dynamic columns into one tabular for¬mat where each dynamic list can grow independently of each other.