Alternating Row Background Color in Reports

Now lets see how to get alternating row background colors in Reports. This is one of the 1^st typical report enhancement you might be doing once you started working on Reporting Services.  See the following report : 

This can be achieved very easily in SSRS with the help of IIF and RowNumber function for a simple report with no groupings.   You can use a background color expression as:

= IIF(RowNumber(Nothing) Mod 2, "White","Gainsboro")

It becomes little complicated in cases of Matrix and when some groupings are involved.  In that case use following expression for the details row within a group:

= IIF(RunningValue(Fields!Some_Field.Value,Count,"Group_Name") Mod 2, "White","Gainsboro")

Here instead of RowNumber function I have used he RunningValue function.  Just remember to replace Some_Field with actual column name and Group_Name with actual Group Name in your report.