SSRS - Lookup only on certain columns in a matrix - reporting-services

Question

I have a matrix table with a column group "Application questions" let's say these are in table 1. Some of the questions have unique string values such as: Name, ID number, email address. But others have an integer value that relates to an actual value for a separate lookup table (table 2), for example, the values for the column "Gender" are 1, 2, 3, for Male, Female, Other. Is there a way in the lookup function that I can isolate the columns that only have integer values or alternatively ignore the other columns with unique string values?
Table1
NAME ATTRIBUTE_id ATTRIBUTE
-----------------------------------------
James 5 1
James 6 james#email.com
James 7 8
Table2
Lookup_id ATTRIBUTE_id Description
-----------------------------------------
1 5 Male
2 5 Female
3 5 Other
8 7 New York
9 7 Los Angeles
Output
NAME | Email | Gender | City
-------------------------------------------------------
James james#email.com Male New York
Hope that makes sense!
Thank you.

Answer 1

I think this will be easier to do in your dataset query.
Below I have recreated your sample data and added an extra person in to make sure it's working as expected.
DECLARE #t TABLE (Name varchar(10), AttributeID INT, AttributeMemberID varchar(50))
INSERT INTO #t VALUES
('Mary', 5, '2'),
('Mary', 6, 'Mary#email.com'),
('James', 5, '1'),
('James', 6, 'james#email.com'),
('James', 7, '8')
DECLARE #AttributeMembers TABLE (AttributeMemberID INT, AttributeID int, Description varchar(20))
INSERT INTO #AttributeMembers VALUES
(1, 5, 'Male'),
(2, 5, 'Female'),
(3, 5, 'Other'),
(8, 7, 'New York'),
(9, 7, 'Los Angeles')
I also added in a new table which describes what each attribute is. We will use the output from this as column headers in the final SSRS matrix.
DECLARE #Attributes TABLE(AttributeID int, Caption varchar(50))
INSERT INTO #Attributes VALUES
(5, 'Gender'),
(6, 'Email'),
(7, 'City')
Finally we join all three togther and get a fairly normalised view for the data. The join is a bit messy as your current tables use the same column for both integer based lookups/joins and absolute string values. Hence the CASE in the JOIN
SELECT
t.Name,
a.Caption,
ISNULL(am.[Description], t.AttributeMemberID) as Label
FROM #t t
JOIN #Attributes a on t.AttributeID = a.AttributeID
LEFT JOIN #AttributeMembers am
on t.AttributeID = am.AttributeID
and
CAST(CASE WHEN ISNUMERIC(t.AttributeMemberID) = 0 THEN 0 ELSE t.AttributeMemberID END as int)
= am.AttributeMemberID
ORDER BY Name, Caption, Label
This gives us the following output...
As you can see, this will be easy to put into a Matrix control in SSRS.
Row group by Name, Column Group by Captionand data cell would beLabel`.
If you wanted to ensure the order of the columns, you could extend the Attributes table to include a SortOrder column, include this in the query output and use this in SSRS to order the columns by.
Hope that's clear enough.