XBRL Schema Support Refactoring Success

In my last post, I mentioned that I was going to embark on a task to replace the homegrown, half baked implementation of XBRL schema support in Gepsio with an implementation that heavily leverages the XmlSchema and XmlSchemaSet classes already in the .NET Framework. I have spent the last week working on that task, and I am happy to report that things are looking very positive.

The XBRL schema support in the current Gepsio CTP is written from the ground up with no support from the .NET Framework other than XmlDocument. All of the schema parsing and type system management in the current CTP uses a homegrown implementation. Since Gepsio is in a CTP state, this support was incomplete. Because of the incomplete, homegrown schema support, some complex schemas used in XBRL documents, and many data types, were not supported and caused Gepsio to throw an exception when they are encountered. Because of these issues, some folks using early versions of the CTP were blocked from using it because the schemas used by the XBRL documents that they were trying to load wouldn’t parse. I’m fairly certain, for example, that the US-GAAP schema can’t be parsed by the current Gepsio CTP.

The exciting aspect of leveraging the XmlSchema and XmlSchemaSet classes available in the .NET Framework for XBRL schema parsing and type management is that the next Gepsio CTP will have complete support for the parsing and type management aspects of complex XBRL schemas. This will give you an even better chance to use Gepsio with XBRL documents that use complex XBRL schemas and taxonomies. Better yet, the new implementation is hidden inside Gepsio’s already-existing XbrlSchema class, so this won’t be a breaking change for anyone. All of this work is being done under the hood, hidden away from you, so you can concentrate on getting information out of your XBRL documents rather than having to worry about the details of schema management. That, after all, is what Gepsio is all about.

Another benefit of this work is that I can delete lots of code from the Gepsio source code base. Any developer can tell you that deleting code is a good thing, because that means that there is less code to manage and maintain and test. Currently, there are entire classes in Gepsio focused on XBRL schema support. There is, for example, an entire set of classes that map to the various simple and complex data types that can be found in an XBRL schema. There is currently a base class called AnyType, from which many other simple and complex type classes derive. Since all of that support will now be coming from the .NET Framework itself, I can happily delete all of those type management classes.

I hope to have this task all wrapped up and available in the next CTP. At this point, I hope to release the next CTP in February 2011. I hope to announce that you should grab the next CTP simply because of the vastly improved schema and type support that it will provide.