Updated Interactive Information Viewer

Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 08:34AM
Charlie in Demonstrations of Using XBRL, Modeling Business Information Using XBRL, XBRL General Information, XBRLS, interactive information hypercube

I have created an updated "interactive information viewer" based on a bunch of work I have done trying to understand how to best render XBRL information in general and specifically for financial reporting.  Details of what I am seeing can be found in these three blog entries:

• Thoughts on Rendering (First Installment) 
• Thoughts on Rendering (Second Installment)
• Thoughts on Rendering (Third Installment)

My next step will be to update the comprehensive example which looks a little more like a financial statement to take advantage of the things which I have learned in this little exercise.  These are the test cases I am using to try and pull all these pieces together:

• Metapatterns: http://www.xbrlsite.com/Demos/Metapatterns/2009-03-14/
• Business use cases: http://www.xbrlsite.com/Patterns/2008-04-18/
• Comprehensive example: http://www.xbrlsite.com/examples/ComprehensiveExample/

If anyone has any better ways to get to the right result, I would love to hear from you.

The goal which I am striving toward is to make the following work for XBRL in general and XBRL specifically for financial reporting:

• Business users can do all of this without the IT department getting involved (ease of use)
• Extensibility which works correctly (not forms)
• Rendering which is easy and interactive (not static renderings)
• Does everthing which is needed today plus more (new beneficial features)
• Global, open standard (not proprietary to one software vendor)

Article originally appeared on XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting (http://xbrl.squarespace.com/).