Using Dimensions (Hierarchies)

Dimensions in PlaidCloud are hierarchies — tree structures that organize things like cost centers, products, accounts, geography, or time periods. They’re the scaffolding that allocations, dashboards, and reports use to slice and aggregate data.

A dimension can carry more than just parent-child relationships. Each node can hold properties, aliases, and values — so a cost center hierarchy can also tell you which currency each center reports in, what business unit it rolls up to in an alternate view, and what its operating budget is.

Dimensions are managed in the Dimensions tab within each project.

Main Hierarchy

Every dimension has a main hierarchy. The main hierarchy defines the complete set of leaf members — every leaf node anywhere in the dimension must appear here.

Think of the main hierarchy as the canonical, single-truth tree. Anything in the dimension is a member of the main hierarchy; the question is just where in the tree it sits.

Alternate (attribute) Hierarchies

Alternate hierarchies are different views of the leaves in the main hierarchy. They can pick a subset of leaves, group them differently, or use entirely different roll-ups.

Two common patterns:

Subset view — pull a specific set of leaves into a focused tree for a specific report or allocation. The alternate inherits any changes to its members from the main.
Different roll-up — same leaves, different parents. For example: the main hierarchy organizes cost centers by department; an alternate organizes the same cost centers by geography.

Managing Dimensions

Creating

From the New button in the toolbar, choose New Dimension. Enter a name, a directory (for folder-style organization), and a descriptive memo.

Click Create — the dimension is ready immediately. You can also create one from a workflow using the Dimension Create step.

Deleting

Select the dimension, open the Actions menu, and choose Delete Dimension. This removes the dimension and all underlying data.

You can also delete from a workflow using the Dimension Delete step.

If you want to keep the dimension but reset its contents (clear all structure, values, aliases, properties, and alternate hierarchies), use Dimension Clear instead of delete.

Copying

Select the dimension, open Actions, and choose Copy Dimension. Specify a name for the copy and click Create Copy. The copy includes values, aliases, properties, and all alternate hierarchies.

Sorting

The dimension management area lets you move members up and down and change parents directly. For large hierarchies, doing this by hand gets tedious — use the Dimension Sort workflow step to sort programmatically. It’s a big time saver after data loads or major restructures.

Loading Dimensions

Loading a dimension means converting tabular source data into hierarchical structure. PlaidCloud supports two data shapes for loads:

Parent-Child — Two columns: one for parent, one for child. Each row defines one edge in the tree. This works for arbitrarily deep, irregular hierarchies.
Levels — One column per level. Row by row, each column tells you the parent at that level. Best for regular hierarchies with predictable depth (e.g., country → region → city).

Loads can also carry values, aliases, and properties alongside the structure. See the Dimension Load workflow step for the full set of options.

Dimension Property Inheritance

A dimension can be configured so that children inherit property values from their ancestors. To turn this on, click the dropdown next to Properties and select Inherited Properties.

Notes on how inheritance behaves:

Inheritance applies to all properties in the dimension — you can’t enable it for one property and not others.
If you set a property on a child, then later delete that value, the child reverts to its parent’s value. Children cannot have a null property when the parent has a value.
Setting a property on a node propagates down to its descendants, overriding their inherited value until they’re explicitly set.
Inheritance walks the tree all the way down to leaf nodes.