How to set up level-based hierarchies (e.g. cost center, profit center, products)

Hi @TELIT002 ,

In Pigment, the way you will handle this is with a dimension for each level.

Then inside the lowest level you will have properties to refers to those levels.

For instance, the Cost Center dimension will be as follow :

L1 and L2 will be property of Data Type dimension

Below will be the L1 and L2 dimension :

Let me know if that’s clear for you or have any other questions

@CDALMAY  Thank you!  My apologies, I was actually referring to parent child hierarchies. Would that change the approach?

HI @TELIT002, in Pigment you have dimension / list properties that would be used to represent the hierarchy columns as you called it. Properties store any information about your items, and properties of type “dimension” can represent relationships between your dimensions / lists. So if there is a 10-level deep cost center hierarchy and you have a file / data source with 10 columns representing that hierarchy, here are steps that should give you what you need.

1. Create the lowest-level dimension / list in the block section, e.g. Cost Center
2. Import your file / data into that dimension
3. As part of the import process (in step 2), map your input columns to new properties (you can create them during the import process) : choose type “dimension” and type the name of your dimension, then use the option to create that dimension on the fly, if it doesn’t exist yet, e.g. “Site” or “Business Unit”, “Entity”, etc (whatever hierarchy levels you have).
4. Make sure to automatically create new items in dependent dimensions, so that you don’t have to import 10 times and can manage all 10 dimensions with this one import. This option is called “Automatically add new items to dependent Dimensions” and you should find it at the top of step 2 in your import process.
5. When the import is successful, you should have all 10 dimensions in Pigment and your lowest level -  Cost Center - can be aggregated in Views and in formulas to any of the other 9 dimensions based on this relationship
6. The 9 dimensions will not have a relationship with each other per default, but you could build out properties for them as well, and instead of an import use a formula by referencing the cost center property (e.g. Site.’Cost Center’.’Business Unit’ could be the formula for your property “Business Unit” of your list “Site”)

Hi, thank you for your contribution and replies regarding level based hiearchies topic.

What about ragged or unbalanced hierarchies ? In ragged hierarchies, the parent member of at least one member of a dimension is not in the level immediately above the member. Like unbalanced hierarchies, the branches of the hierarchies can descend to different levels.

In order to ensure correct calculations, levels must be defined in a balanced way which produce the following output with duplicated items.

Is there any way to skip or hide duplicated levels on the fly ? We are currently dealing with a P&L hierarchy where accounts appears 2, 3 or even 4 times.

Hi ​@srx it’s not required to populate all hierarchy levels.

In a tree view, this should give you exactly what you wanted, or am I missing something?

Tabular view is not ideal in that case, of course.

If it’s not an option to have those main hierarchy properties blank, maybe you could use a second set of properties that would allow for those blank hierarchy levels and use it in those views where you’d want it to behave like this.

Would that work for you?

Thanks ​@oliverlee, I though that empty levels could be a problem for calculation consistency.

I will review this.