title: SSRS 2008 group variables - count items within a group
body: <p>I have a report which grabs a whole bunch of statistical data that represent system alarms.</p>
  
  <p>I've made a drilldown style report by pulling back all the stats in a user selected date range and then I added a group on my alarm's codeId so I would have something to group on.</p>
  
  <p>What I would like to do is have a count of the number of items within these groups by codeId. I plan to use the count as part of a concatenated string that makes up the whole group header. It basically says "Alarm Code # {codeId} - {Description} - Total: {Total}".</p>
  
  <p>My issue is that to do a count in my query then I have to pre-group the data before it hits the report. And if I do that then I do not have my detail data to expand the group on. And running a summary and a detail dataset is a bit over my head but an option I might have to look into.</p>
  
  <p>So I was hoping I could use a group variable to count the number of items contained within the group. Can anyone tell me a rough set of steps to try to pull that off?</p>