I am happy to announce the release and open-sourcing of a nifty little chainsaw of a utility. Jessub, short for Java Essbase Substitutions, is a small text-replacing utility designed specifically to update the code in a MaxL script template by replacing specialized tokens with values you specify. You can specify the values as being almost any aspect of a date, and you can specify the date as being the current date plus or minus a number of days, months, or years.

In terms of automation, you would write a batch file that calls Jessub (a single Java jar file), giving it the name of a specially formatted MaxL file, and the name of an output file. You then call the output file with the normal MaxL interpreter. This approach can be useful when you just want to drop in a quick solution without having to code custom Java against the Essbase API. The automation is also resilient to upgrades since it’s just generating plain MaxL script.

I have frequently needed to update variables based on the current day, or a set of variables based on the current day, for use with calc scripts or report scripts. For example, I might have a process that needs to set a variable on Sunday (Day 1 of the week) to a certain value, then each day of the week, set another variable to the current day of the week at the time. Then I might run a calc script that copies data from the Forecast scenario to the current day.

Jessub provides the entire spectrum of options available to the String.format() method in Java. Essentially, you can pull out almost any aspect of the date. Combined with small format codes to roll the days/months/years forward/backward, you can generate almost any date or relative date that you need. No more getting up on the weekends to update substitution variables!

Jessub is the evolution of many similar one-off tools I have created in the past. It is generic, robust, and easy to use. I always say that a good administrator is a lazy administrator, so I hope anyone interested out there can put this to good use. The entire code base is licensed under the liberal Apache License 2.0, so you are essentially free to take the code (should be so inclined) and do absolutely anything you want to it. Although my hope is that if you find it useful, you will let me know and suggest improvements.

Jessub can be found at its project site, where you can find documentation, examples, browse the code, and a runnable JAR download file (with documentation as well). Please enjoy this free (as in speech and as in beer) utility.