I was discussing inline XBRL with a client the other day when a thought occurred to me. GoFiler uses XDX to mark information in a document to convert it to inline XBRL at a later time, which is generally great, but it means if you have a line item on a table that doesn’t actually have a label (like a total line, for example), then GoFiler is just going to pick the standard label for that element. That’s not a bad thing, in and of itself, but if you want to customize the label, there needs to be some text on the line item for XDX to pick up. Adding hidden text to the document is a great way to add “hints” for XDX, without actually changing the look of the exported document.

 About a week ago, a client brought up a good point in a discussion we were having about inline XBRL in GoFiler. While we could generate proof files for the XBRL and proof files for the HTML, the HTML proof only showed HTML data, and the XBRL proof only showed XBRL data. The HTML proof wasn’t highlighting which facts had been tagged with inline XBRL data, because unless you view it through a special viewer, it looks indistinguishable from regular HTML. It’s a feature we will be adding in a future release of GoFiler, but why wait? Through Legato features can be added on the fly!

When working in Legato, it’s very common to come across a task that must be repeated. Several of our example scripts in this blog have used for loops or while loops. In fact, it’s fairly uncommon to write a script without one because almost any task that is complex enough that it would require a script to be written for it generally needs to iterate over something. This week, we’re going to take a look at what makes the two loop types Legato supports different, and why you would choose one over the other.

Last week, Josh discussed how we can use the ConvertFile function to convert files from their base format into HTML, in LDC #136. This week, we’re going to take that idea one step further, and create a script that can start and stop a background process that monitors a folder for files to convert. If it finds a file that hasn’t been converted, or has been modified since it was last converted, the background process will convert the file into HTML for us automatically. This creates a “hot” folder effectively, that’s monitored for jobs to do.

Whenever a task has to be done repeatedly and there’s not much thought that needs to go into running the task, it’s generally a great candidate for automating using a Legato script. I’ve been asked a few times in the past month or so how to quickly and easily insert multiple images into an HTML file. Since that’s a relatively easy task that just requires a lot of the same operation over and over again, I thought it would make a great example of automation for our Legato blog. So this week, we’ll take a look at a simple script that takes a folder as an input, scans it for images, and then inserts all of the images it finds into an HTML file.

Last year, I wrote a series of blog posts on a Page Break Manager tool for GoFiler. It allowed users to save page breaks into a style template, rename them, and delete them. One feature was conspicuously absent though, the ability to edit a page break. Well, it seems like now would be a good time to rectify that mistake! This blog post is going to go over how to add the edit function to this script. It’s also a really good example of code should be written in a fairly modular fashion, because it makes it a lot easier to come back in and edit things later. I wrote this seven months ago, I don’t really remember how a lot of the functions work exactly. Things like reading the file into a data table, or saving the file back out, are somewhat complicated, and while I’m sure I could figure out how it’s working, there’s really no need to, since those are self-contained functions within the script. I don’t need to know how they work really, as long as they do what they’re supposed to do I can simply re-use them in this new function without a problem.