Library for analyzing xbrl files in java

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to: read xbrl files, analyze the files and make use of the data e.g. for calculating key figures, in Java.

I know how to read xbrl files as xml and structuring them with json nodes, but I have concluded that it's much more complicated to actually analyze them and use the data. I figured out that tags and attributes like "context id", "period" and "dimenson" etc determines how data is wired together.

Now, I'm not going to implement my own xbrl processor from scratch, because I simply don't have the time and knowledge to do that.

I'm looking for a Java library, including documentation and/or guides on how to use it, that processes xbrl files and that can be used to analyze and extract data.

I searched the web and read a few articles about how to get started, but I didn't quite find something that seemed very useful.

Any suggestions? I would really appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction.

Answer 1

Using an existing XBRL processor is a good idea as it saves you the (considerable) efforts of interpreting the XBRL semantics at a raw syntactic level.

From the top of my mind, I know of at least the following products that offer a Java API, in a random order. I have no affiliation with either and abstain from commenting further to not land into a taste/preference discussion.

• Reporting Standard: http://www.reportingstandard.com/index.php/en/
• CoreFiling: https://www.corefiling.com/

There are probably many more, possibly also open source. XBRL.org has a much more comprehensive list of vendors here as well as a getting started guide for developers.

Answer 2

I was able to parse Xbrl files from XbrlParser project here.

Credits: https://github.com/marcioalexandre