Arelle + Google Apps Script = Recent Filings Viewer

I discovered a few exciting things about 1) arelle 2) Google App Scripts– over the course of the week. But I’ll save the boring-stuff for the bottom of the post. Log in to your Google account and open up this Google Spreadsheet.

Warning to XBRL Gurus; this is nothing miraculous. Indeed, the code mainly parsed the SEC’s RSS feed.

Warning to Excel-ophiles; Google Spreadsheet is fantastic, and can create Excel outputs. Try it, you’ll like it.

 

Here are the three steps:

 

The sheet should install a “Finanz” in your toolbar. Click it, and choose “Recent Filings” from the dropdown

Click on the “Refresh” button. You’ll know it’s working if it says “Loading…” after your click. It is loading the SEC’s latest XBRL filings, which they publish in RSS format here: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/usgaap.rss.xml

After the latest filings have loaded, hover (or click) a company for more options. Choose the “Load” button. Later on, I’ll make the “Info” button show some summary statistics.

arellecmd.appspot.com processes the XBRL instance document, and I print the facts here (sorted by number-of-facts-which-use-that-element; an additional column I added, “Count”). Now you can export to Excel, sort, filter, or make graphs.

I think you can “make a copy” to view all the source code (and modify it for yourself!)  Google Developer has great documentation.

Here are some things I learned, in quick succession:

• arelle
  • Arelle can run on webserver
    • Presumably works with  CGI (Common Gateway Interface) and WSGI( Web Services Gateway Interface)
    • Uses Bottle (lightweight WSGI-implementation)
    • It uses a RESTful API
    • In fact, the download page has a specific implementation
    • That is hosted on GitHub?
    • More arelle documentation here
• • Google App Engine can run it
    • Google App Engine does run it; it’s already deployed here
    • Google App Engine only supports Python 2.7; arelle’s latest is Python 3.2
    • Hence the download
  • To pass an link at http protocol (inside the URL itself); URL-encode the “:” as “%3A”
    • i.e. to open this
      • http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/916907/000092708914000178/smbc-20140331.xml
    • pass it as this
      • http://arellecmd.appspot.com/rest/xbrl/http%3A//www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/916907/000092708914000178/smbc-20140331.xml/facts
    • or else make a query param out of it
      • http://arellecmd.appspot.com/rest/xbrl/view?file=http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/916907/000092708914000178/smbc-20140331.xml&view=facts&media=json
• Google App Scripts
  • Uses caja to sanitize the HTML generated in a Script
    • Affects your HTML for example:
    • Bootstrap data-attribute

<div class="progress-bar" data-caja-role="progressbar" data-caja-aria-valuenow="45" data-caja-aria-valuemin="0" data-caja-aria-valuemax="100" style="width: 45%;"> <span class="sr-only">45% Complete</span> </div>

• • • Angular directive
      • TODO: Show how it changes
    • Affects your resources:
      • CSS animations are name-changed; their references won’t work
      • @font-face declarations won’t reference the right files
  • Is “Service”-oriented
    • Reaches to scripts run on server, but written in Javascriptin files suffixed “.gs” (GoogleScript?)
  • Can write scripts for different contexts:
    • UI/Client-side Scripts
      • Can use libraries; but not like running directly in a browser
    • Server-side Scripts
      • suffixed .gs
      • Run on server; no worries about browser support?
      • For instance, I can trust gs to create a JS (GS?) Date object from a standard date string
  • Can access Google API’s
  • Can be deployed as a Web App, or as an add-on
    • Process for publishing to App Script library:
      1. Container-bound
      2. Authorization lifecycle
      3. Apply to be published
  • Has its own template language inside its HTMLService
    • Encourages a separation of the three, even though everything is either a “Html” file or a server-side “Script”

 

 

EDIT: I realize arelle already made this site to search the latest, with the JSON URLs here 

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