Sparklines are used to indicate trends in your data and so provide insight into what might happen in the future. Sparklines also make it easier to spot data that is out of sync or that displays non-normal behavior. In statistical terms, these are referred to as outliers. Sparklines cannot be added to the detail level in a Tablix, you have to add them to a group header or footer row. This is because they work on aggregate values.

You can consider a Sparkline as a mini-chart. I will explain the usage of the chart control later in this chapter.

The following is an example of object: Packt - CH04-6, using Sparklines:

The dataset of the report contains the following information:

In order to keep the dataset simple, I'm using the customer ledger entry table and, in the OnAfterGetRecord trigger of the ledger, I'm fetching the customer information so I can add the city and country to the dataset as extra columns.