I had a need for the Hyperion Parent Inferrer functionality for an internal project I am working on. It didn’t quite do what I needed out of the box so I updated things a bit. As quick background, the Hyperion Parent Inferrer is a simple one-off Java program/library I developed (apparently four years ago, wow) to parse indented data into an explicit parent/child file.

There are a few (apparently rare) cases where this is useful. In my case, I was modeling some hierarchical data and I find the indented format to be much easier on the eyes. Like so:

Time
 Q1
  January
  February
  March
 Q2
  April
  May
  June
 Q3
  July
  August
  September
 Q4
  October
  November
  December

But when it comes time to load in to Essbase, clearly we need something more explicit. The Hyperion Parent Inferrer takes that preceding as input and then outputs something like the following:

,Time
Time,Q1
Q1,January
Q1,February
Q1,March
Time,Q2
Q2,April
Q2,May
Q2,June
Time,Q3
Q3,July
Q3,August
Q3,September
Time,Q4
Q4,October
Q4,November
Q4,December

The program has been enhanced to allow for a custom indentation character (such as tabs), to be able to specify the text rendered when there is no parent (instead of null), and a couple other little cleanups.

Hyperion Parent Inferrer is free, open source (Apache Software License version 2), and can be run as a standalone command-line Java program or as a Java library that can be incorporated into a typical Java program. The updated code is available at the Hyperion Parent Inferrer GitHub page.