XBRL 2.1
XBRL 2.1
This wiki page is for notes about the use of the XBRL 2.1 specification. We will document here things like best practices, ideas hints in order to properly use XBRL 2.1
Marvellous things about XBRL 2.1
This section describes functionality that is included in the XBRL 2.1 specification and really facilitates the modelling of business concepts into XBRL 2.1 concepts
Tuples
Tuples groups things together. This is the main purpose of a tuple in the XBRL 2.1 specification and also in the XML Schema specification from the W3C. A Tuple represent the construction of a concept that requires other concepts in order to make it meaningful.
The tipical example of a tuple is a person. One can think that a person is composed by two things, a name and a surname. So it is very clear and simple to understand that a person can be defined as a group of a name and a surname.
Dimensions
Dimensions was created by Ignacio Hernández-Ros (founder of Reporting Standard S.L.) in order to fill a gaap in the deifinition of concept properties and validation rules of concept properties.
A concept property is, for example, the type of a telephone number (fax, voice, ...). Properties can be defined using special XBRL Concept definitions called dimensions and possible dimension values can also be defined using XBRL and XML syntactical artifacts like hypercubes, members etc.
A property adds two things to a concept definition:
- The existence of the property for that concept
- A property value for a fact item of that concept in a report
Common errors about tuples and dimensions
Some taxonomies worldwide (and regulators) are trying to force the use of just one of the technologies (dimensions) against the other (tuples). In our experience this is just because of the personality of the decision makers and the lack of technical knowledge in order to make proper decisions. The decisions has come into a very complex modelling scenario in which companies has to create dimensions and taxonomy extensions for things that naturally are beter modelled using a tuple.
In our experience, a taxonomy can use both, Tuples and Dimensions together, in order to achieve the better quality in modelling techniques around XBRL. Some taxonomies like Australia SBR are already following this modelling technique and more will follow in the future.
