This is the fourth and final blog post in this series. In this last entry, we will be taking everything we’ve written so far and adding to it a couple of new functions to allow us to take two separate XFR files and merge the instance files together into a single file. In the end, we’ve allowed the user to select two files to compare, altered the currencies as necessary, merged the files, and exported the instance files into a single document.

Last week we added to our XBRL Merger script, giving it the ability to export files and compare the exported files to see if they were able to be merged. This week, we’ll take it another step further by adding in the ability to read the XBRL instance files into data structures, add some debug information, and add a progress bar to the run function. This week introduces the concept of debug print messages. Often when writing a script, you will encounter an issue where you’re not sure what the actual value of a variable is. Depending on the integrated development environment (IDE) being used to write the code, you can sometimes step through the code with breakpoints and inspect the values for each variable. While we’re going to be adding that feature to GoFiler’s Legato IDE, for now we find it helpful to insert various functions that print variables to a console. By adding a special function to do this, you can make showing/hiding debug information very easy. See the section on the debug_message function’s code below for more.

This week, we will be continuing to write our XBRL Merger script. The previous post covered how to prompt the user for a pair of files, checked to make sure those files were valid XFR files that we could actually access, and finally made sure that they weren’t the same files. This week we’re taking it a step further by opening the files (or switching to them if they are already open), exporting them to new directories, and comparing the contents of these directories. This script is intended to merge two very similar files, where the only difference is a couple of facts being tagged with a different unit, so the exported file sets need to very closely match.

Legato is great at supplementing features that GoFiler already has and hooking into existing functions and modifying how they work slightly. Probably its most powerful ability, however, is to add entirely new functionality to GoFiler. One feature GoFiler doesn’t have natively is the ability to have multiple currency types for a single fact in XBRL. Well, we can add support for that using Legato! The new functionality will be achieved by combining two different XFR files.

Legato is capable of integrating into a huge variety of systems and interfaces. There are a variety of ways to do this, but one of the easiest to implement in Legato is through HTTP POST and GET functions. These functions send a message to a specified web page, which the web page can then handle in some way, and respond. In this week’s blog post, we are going to look at a way that we can hook Legato to download from a web site a CIK library and a Reporting Owners library. I’ve uploaded an example handler page, which can be found here:

10-11-2017 Update: As of Chrome 61, it appears this issue has been resolved. Chrome displays these pages correctly now.

Last week, the Novaworks support team was alerted to a very interesting bug when viewing certain filings on the EDGAR website. In documents that are sufficiently large, a TABLE tag that uses left align or right align or a DIV tag that uses float left or float right can cause the document to display out of order in Google Chrome. Normally, Chrome has no problem displaying these files. However, when the document is filed to the SEC, EDGAR injects some non-HTML tags at the top of it. At the top of every document, the SEC injects tags like these: