Renewed Focus on Gepsio Development

I released a CTP of the Gepsio code base in the early months of 2009, not quite knowing what to expect. I have, since that time, been humbled to find that it has received 10,354 page views, 2,779 visits and 1,598 downloads. I realize that that's a far cry from a large scale effort, but it does show that there are people curious about how XBRL might be used in a .NET context.

It is that curiosity that has led me back to continue develop on Gepsio, and this blog is one part of that renewed development focus. My goal with Gepsio is to provide parsing, validation and object model exposure for XBRL documents for .NET developers.

My unit testing methodology for Gepsio is to get Gepsio to a state in which it can be used to successfully validate all of the tests in the XBRL-CONF-CR3-2007-03-05 conformance suite published by the XBRL folks in 2007 (I know that newer conformance suites exist, and I will get to those at some point in the future). Once I find a test that doesn't pass with a Gepsio build, I investigate the issue, put the necessary upgrades into Gepsio and rerun the conformance suite until the previously failing test passes. In this way, I can be confident that I am adding only what is necessary to Gepsio while still ensuring that the final builds pass a subsection of tests. As of the latest Gepsio build, the following XBRL-CONF-CR3-2007-03-05 conformance suite test groups are correctly implemented in Gepsio:

• ID Scope Tests
• Context Tests
• Period Type Tests
• Unit of Measure Tests
• Decimal and Precision Mutual Exclusion and prohibition on nil items
• Required Arc in Definition Linkbase
• Schema References

The next area of focus for Gepsio is to implement the calculation binding code, which will implement support for the precision and decimals attributes on an XBRL item.

Thank you for your interest in Gepsio. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to let me know.