Compared to traditional paper forms, fillable PDF forms offer numerous benefits – aside from saving trees – including removing issues with legibility, allowing data validation, reducing re-keying errors, and streamlining information storage and re-use.
I, for one, really wish my kids’ school would switch to PDF forms for the myriad back-to-school information pages that we fill out in triplicate every fall. Perhaps I can give the administrators a demo of StyleVision, which just added support for fillable PDF form creation.
Unlike other PDF form design tools, however, StyleVision also provides form workflow functionality via integration with StyleVision Server for extracting and processing the data that end users enter. Let’s take a look at how it works.
Read more…
New Tools to Work with XBRL in Excel
With the importance of accurate, standardized financial reporting enforced through XBRL filing mandates, having XBRL tools you can rely on is a must. What’s more, financial professionals need to be able to generate XBRL reports easily without getting bogged down by the complexities of XBRL syntax.
Altova offers several add-ins for Excel that make it easy for organizations to comply with regulations from the EBA, EIOPA, and other regulatory bodies that mandate reporting in XBRL. These easy-to-use software products integrate directly into Excel so that users can create valid XBRL reports in an environment where they’re already comfortable working. And, the add-ins support importing existing XBRL reports to Excel for easy readability and analysis.
The latest release of the Altova XBRL Add-ins for Excel provides some important new features – let’s take a look.
New Data Integration Tools
Altova MissionKit tools offer numerous ways to connect to, query, and integrate data from disparate sources. With multiple product releases each year, we’re constantly working to deliver increased power and efficiency for data integration, while adding features requested by customers. This includes ongoing updates to built-in support for all major SQL databases across the product line.
Let’s take a look at some of the recently added tools and enhancements.
New Tools for XML and JSON Editing
The latest release of XMLSpy adds several user-requested features for working with JSON and XML, as well as new functionality for debugging XPath, updated standards and database support, and more.
How to Convert Legacy Text Files [Video]
It’s a common requirement to convert non-standard or legacy text files to or from structured data formats like XML, JSON, and relational databases. However, many times legacy text files are not in a format that can be readily processed by data mapping tools, especially when they have a complex and unique structure that does not consistently fit into CSV or fixed-length field patterns. Moreover, sometimes you need to extract only portions of useful data from a legacy text file.
MapForce, Altova’s any-to-any data conversion tool, includes a unique utility called FlexText that makes it easy to visually define templates for parsing text files and making them accessible to the data mapping tool.
See how FlexText works in our video tutorial.
The example files referenced in the video are available here and you can try FlexText with a free, 30-day trial of MapForce.
Data Mapping JSON Lines
The JSON data format continues to evolve as an open standard as it is creatively applied to new data interchange requirements. JSON Lines, defined at http://jsonlines.org/, is a convenient text format for storing structured data where each record is a single line and a valid JSON object. JSON Lines handles tabular data and clearly identifies data types without ambiguity. This allows records to be processed one at a time, which makes the format very useful for exporting and sending data.
Altova MapForce supports data mapping JSON Lines as either a data source or target. Let’s look at a mapping project to extract records from a database table and map to a JSON Lines file for output.
An Easy Way to Test HTTP Requests During Development
Web and web services developers often need to send HTTP requests – whether for testing APIs, testing REST and SOAP web services, or managing web sites.
XMLSpy makes it easy to send and receive HTTP requests directly in the XML and JSON editor during development with its HTTP Window and WADL/WSDL Import Wizard, a great time-saving tool for debugging web services.
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How to Create Fillable PDF Forms
Compared to traditional paper forms, fillable PDF forms offer numerous benefits – aside from saving trees – including removing issues with legibility, allowing data validation, reducing re-keying errors, and streamlining information storage and re-use.
I, for one, really wish my kids’ school would switch to PDF forms for the myriad back-to-school information pages that we fill out in triplicate every fall. Perhaps I can give the administrators a demo of StyleVision, which just added support for fillable PDF form creation.
Unlike other PDF form design tools, however, StyleVision also provides form workflow functionality via integration with StyleVision Server for extracting and processing the data that end users enter. Let’s take a look at how it works.
Read more…