1. Working with Disclosure Management for Narrative Reporting
  2. Publishing Disclosure Management Reports
  3. Working with Inline XBRL

Working with Inline XBRL

When you produce a report in XBRL, the resultant file has tags that are readable by machines, but the lack of a presentation format makes it difficult to read by people. In contrast, inline XBRL (iXBRL) enables you to produce reports in a format that is readable to both people and machines in a single file. The data in the report can be arranged and formatted the way you want, and when a user views the report in an iXBRL viewer, the tags can be expanded to show the XBRL information that has been mapped to them.

Disclosure Management supports the Inline XBRL 1.1 specification.

iXBRL allows the user to view the XBRL tags on the document without having to maintain or create a separate XBRL file. The same validation, tagging process, taxonomy rules and best practices apply to both XBRL and iXBRL reports.

Many regulators accept XBRL, iXBRL, or both for regulatory filings. For example, these regulators accept both formats:

  • SEC US-GAAP

  • HMRC (UK) FRS 101, FRS 102

Publishing and Viewing iXBRL

To publish a report in iXBRL format:

  1. On the Disclosure Management ribbon, click Publish, and then select iXBRL

    The report is validated automatically as part of the publish process. The report can be validated in UK HRMC format.

  2. Enter a file name and select a destination to save the published files.

    The output file is a compressed file that contains all the iXBRL report files. It is saved with a .DMR file extension.

To view the report:

  1. Locate the DMR file that was created when you published the report, and change the file extension to .ZIP.

  2. Open the ZIP file with a compression utility, and extract the file with an .XHTML extension. This file contains your iXBRL report.

  3. Open the XHTML file with a browser to view the report in HTML. Optionally, you can open the file with an iXBRL viewer, such as Arelle or VT Fact Viewer, to see the iXBRL metadata that is embedded in the document.

You can also preview a report in iXBRL by clicking Preview, then View, and then iXBRL. When you preview the file, you can view the standard HTML text only. If you want to view the iXBRL metadata in addition to the regular text, you should open the file in an iXBRL reader, such as Arelle or VT Fact Viewer.

Note:

You can express concepts of durationItemType (for example us-gaap:AcquiredFiniteLivedIntangibleAssetsWeightedAverageUsefulLife ) expressed as words and the system will transform them into valid durational type outputs. For example, "Five years, two months" is transformed as "P5Y2M".

Some considerations when working with iXBRL:

  • When working with tables of contents in Microsoft Word, do not use tabs to create space, as this can throw off the page numbering.

  • When you validate iXBRL, if Arelle is unable to connect to the internet to perform the validation, see "Updating the HTTP cache" in Tips and Troubleshooting.

  • You cannot nest tables or shapes in your report, or the system will display an HTML syntax error when you try to generate iXBRL. Save the nested tables or shapes as a single image file (for example, JPG or GIF) before you generate iXBRL.

  • When working with ordered lists in Microsoft Word, do not use Set Numbering Value to start the list with a number other than 1. If the ordered list in Word does not start at 1, the system displays an error during validation.