var doc = XbrlDocument.Load("iXBRLDoc.xml");
foreach(var fragment in doc.XbrlFragments)
{
    // process iXBRL fragment
}

Dear Jeff

Thanks for coming back so quickly. I am ashamed to say that I did not even know about XBRL until the evening of 31 Dec when I was trying to file accounts with HMRC and bumped into this for the first time. HMRC declined to accept my pdf and I now have to pay a fine for late filing!

It might help if I explain that I trained as an accountant (with PW) but ended up in the software industry and am competent in VBA and tolerably competent in C and C#.

My initial feel is that iXBRL is something of a camel (on the lines that a camel has been described as a horse designed by a committee). The whole point of submitted accounts is that presentation is king and for that you want something as precise as pdf so that the presentation is independent of the rendering agent. The US concept of an XBRL structured data representation makes perfect sense as a complement to a properly designed layout presentation. I

n contrast, the iXBRL documents I have seen result in nasty looking accounts which is hardly surprising as xml/html is not what you would choose for precision layout. So why did the iXBRL folk not just work out a way of including the XBRL data content as a separate section at the end of the presentation content in a way that the rendering agent would treat this as metadata not for display.

Preparation of such documents would then have been quite easy instead of the significant problem that we now have as we have to convert our word and excel documents into inline XBRL in a way that meets the HMRC standard. There are commercial solutions which will do this for you but they all cost a ridiculous amount of money and add another layer of complication. Products like CorelFiling are now tied into the accounting majors and accountancy software firms.

Perhaps I am wrong and separating out all the XBRL stuff into one section of the xml file could be valid solution acceptable to the standard and HMRC? Or are my first thoughts right and the inline XBRL has to be adjacent to the xml fragments which contain the matching natural language content.

I attach some sample files from the HMRC Corporation Tax site for your perusal. When you file the CT return, HMRC require you to submit accounts in iXBRL format.

I have not had time yet to download the gepsio material from the codeplex site but it would be useful to know what other operations one could perform using powershell script along the lines of the example you give.

Many thanks and I shall follow this with interest

Hugh Meares

From: jeffreyferguson

var doc = XbrlDocument.Load("iXBRLDoc.xml");

foreach(var fragment in doc.XbrlFragments)

{

    // process iXBRL fragment

}

RESEND

3 no files should be attached