One of the challenges of developing software in a Windows environment is dealing with user permissions. If a user can’t access a file, that can bring your script to a grinding (and sometimes unexpected) halt. Understanding what a user can and cannot do is crucial to avoiding this scenario and ensuring only files to which the user has access are available for reading, writing, and executing. Today we’re going to take a look at a look at how Legato can help you determine what permissions a user has and ensure those file permissions don’t inappropriately interfere with your script’s proper execution.
Continue reading "LDC #45: Administrative Rights" »Friday, July 28. 2017
LDC #45: Administrative Rights
Wednesday, July 26. 2017
XBRL US Data Quality Committee Presents Fifth Rule set for Public Review
The XBRL US Center for Data Quality has begun a public review period on July 19th, 2017, for the fifth set of proposed rules to provide guidance and aid for issuers in identifying errors in their XBRL SEC filings. The Data Quality Committee rules aim to help filers limit mistakes and avoid data inconsistencies that can adversely affect analysis of reported financial information.
Continue reading "XBRL US Data Quality Committee Presents Fifth..." »Friday, July 21. 2017
LDC #44: Mapped Text Objects: Power in Editing Text
Editing text is the foundation of many computer applications, and there are a lot of ways to access and manage textual data and the editing process. As a user changes text, characters and lines of data must be altered, deleted, or inserted, which in turn requires potentially large swaths of data be shifted to accommodate the changes. As you might imagine, actions like these can become extremely cumbersome and time consuming. In addition, there are times you might want to randomly access a data within a text file, say by a line. If we have a large chunk of text in memory or a file and we want to go to line 3017, the program would have to count line endings from the start of the data until it reached the 3017th link. Yuck! Let’s see what Legato can do to help managing text as it’s edited.
Continue reading "LDC #44: Mapped Text Objects: Power in Editing..." »Monday, July 17. 2017
SEC Releases EDGAR 17.2
On July 17, 2017, EDGAR 17.2 was released by the Securities and Exchange Commission. This release contained changes that added new fields to a number of forms that designate whether a registrant is an Emerging Growth Company and to inform the SEC as to whether the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards. Other changes affect a number of forms, including Form D, Form CFPortal, Form 17HACON, and the exhibit document for Form ABS-EE.
Continue reading "SEC Releases EDGAR 17.2" »Friday, July 14. 2017
LDC #43: Character Entity Spacing Issue When Printing
Last week, our support desk here at Novaworks received an interesting email regarding the spacing between ampersand characters (‘&’) and the rest of the line. This space was lost when the document was printed. Through some testing, we’ve discovered that when printing a document from Internet Explorer to PDF or a normal printer, if the first character on a line of code begins a character entity or is an ampersand then the return on the line above it will not be treated as whitespace for printing purposes but instead ignored. Take the following code for example:
Continue reading "LDC #43: Character Entity Spacing Issue When..." »Thursday, July 13. 2017
Forms N-1A, N-3, and N-CSR: New Changes Require Funds To Describe Securities Lending Activities
On August 1, 2017, new rules that require funds to describe their securities lending activities will go into effect.
Continue reading "Forms N-1A, N-3, and N-CSR: New Changes Require..." »Friday, July 07. 2017
LDC #42: Unregistering and Changing Software Keys
There are times when it may be desirable or necessary to change GoFiler’s software key or unregister it from your system. There’s no easy way to do this through the application’s GUI. One can always uninstall the software or reinstall it to apply a different key than the one attached to the current installation, but that’s time-consuming and can destroy GoFiler preferences and settings you’d like to keep. With Legato and some batch scripting, changing the software key for a GoFiler installation or unregistering the application is simple. Note: whatever software key you apply to your installation must be valid, and a valid key can only be purchased through Novaworks. Contact the support or sales departments to inquire about the status of your software key(s) or to purchase new or additional keys.
Continue reading "LDC #42: Unregistering and Changing Software Keys" »Thursday, July 06. 2017
SEC Expands JOBS Act Benefit to All Companies
On June 29, 2017, the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance announced that it will permit all companies to submit draft registration statements relating to initial public offerings for review on a non-public basis. In addition to IPOs, this process will be available to most other offerings made during a company’s first year after entering the public reporting system.
Continue reading "SEC Expands JOBS Act Benefit to All Companies" »Friday, June 30. 2017
LDC #41: Align Outline Text
The script for this week is going to be another request by a customer. It is a good example of how to search for patterns in HTML and replace the content matching that pattern. A common task when converting an HTML document is trying to get indented paragraphs to indent at the same level. This is especially problematic when the document contains numbered paragraphs that are not hanging (such as a legal outline.) Dealing with this case isn’t exactly trivial in HTML, as it often imports with a set number of non-breaking spaces to create the indent. Unless you’re using a monospace font, the text will not perfectly align, and the outline will not look the same for every number. The best solution is to remove the non-breaking spaces, and wrap the lead-in text (the “(a)”, or “1.”, or “Section 1.”, etc) with a inline tag, using the display type “inline-block”. This, combined with a fixed width and “nowrap” properties, allows us to add a block of space that is a fixed width into a paragraph, so our lead-in text takes up exactly the right amount of space.
Continue reading "LDC #41: Align Outline Text" »Friday, June 23. 2017
LDC #40: Edit Objects
Today we’re going to be talking about the Edit Object. Every edit window in GoFiler that is based on text, as well as some that aren’t, interacts with an Edit Object. An Edit Object allows GoFiler to have a standardized way of communication with other windows, processes, and functions, as well as with the content of the edit window. Legato can work with an Edit Object in a couple of ways, allowing us as a developer to get data about what is showing on the screen as well as change some of that data.
Continue reading "LDC #40: Edit Objects" »Thursday, June 22. 2017
SEC Names Robert Evans III as Deputy Director in the Division of Corporation Finance
On June 20th, 2017, the Securities and Exchange Commission named Robert Evans III as the Deputy Director in the Division of Corporation Finance.
Continue reading "SEC Names Robert Evans III as Deputy Director..." »Wednesday, June 21. 2017
How To Schedule an EDGAR Filing
Through Novaworks Submission Service (NSS), it’s possible to automatically schedule filings. This is an extremely handy tool to help streamline your submission process, as not only can you prepare your filing in advance, you can also have GoFiler send it to the SEC for you and notify you and your production team of the filing’s status.
Continue reading "How To Schedule an EDGAR Filing" »Friday, June 16. 2017
LDC #39: Application Initialize Script
So far, every script we’ve explored has been a hook of some sort. They attach themselves to new or existing menu icons or are triggered by other functions being run. What if you want something to run on application start? Legato supports this through the Application Initialize script. On program start, GoFiler will always run the ApplicationStartup.ls script. This script file is the one that’s responsible for running every other script in the extensions folder. This allows users to create their own custom startup routines that are run before literally anything else.
Continue reading "LDC #39: Application Initialize Script" »Thursday, June 15. 2017
Styles Come and Go; Consistency Is Timeless
A taxonomy style guide isn’t about creating a memorable “style”. The style guide is about building clear, transparent, understandable standards that result in predictable communication every time. XBRL relies on a taxonomy of concepts to identify facts, contexts and other relationships. Any ambiguity in the language used within that taxonomy to communicate data, could produce inconsistent results.
Continue reading "Styles Come and Go; Consistency Is Timeless" »Wednesday, June 14. 2017
Public Comments Available for SEC's Proposal for Inline XBRL Tagging
In March, the SEC introduced proposed changes to include Inline XBRL Tagging in financial filings. We covered these proposed amendments in this blog post. The public comment period recently ended on May 16th, and the comments are available to read here. XBRL US offered one such comment on the proposed requirements to include Inline XBRL in financial filings, and in it expressed agreement that inclusion on Inline XBRL will help to improve the quality of reported structured financial data while reducing the burden on filers.
Continue reading "Public Comments Available for SEC's Proposal..." »