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: