I am pleased to release another small one-off Hyperion-related open-source tool into the wild: Hyperion Parent Inferrer. This Java program/library can be used to translate a space-delimited hierarchy file into one with explicit parent-child mappings. For example, consider the following input file:

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

Hyperion Parent Inferrer will generate the following output:

null,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

As with most of the things I release these days, this tool is just a cleaned up version of something that I needed or used once or twice. In this case I wrote this up to help with a conversion process at some time in the past.

Now, I’m not saying that the approach I had to take was ideal or there weren’t better solutions. But oftentimes the environment that we operate in is less than ideal and you just gotta find a way to duct tape everything together. Hence this tool. The code as it sits today works perfectly fine but does not provide much in the way of configurability or options that might make it useful in more contexts. But as with some of the other projects I have released, I thought it would be nice to toss this over the fence in case anyone can benefit from it.

If you find a use for this or want to show me your clever Python/Perl one-liner that does the same thing, let me know!