November 2016

Learn About Inline XBRL and XBRL Taxonomy Packages

November 29, 2016/in Software, Tools, XBRL /by Erin Cavanaugh

As adoption of the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) for financial reporting increases worldwide, new standards are emerging to meet the needs of filing companies and developers alike. Altova’s line of XBRL-enabled products supports a wide-range of XBRL standards and is updated frequently as new specifications emerge.

Let’s take a closer look at two of the newer XBRL standards – Inline XBRL and XBRL Taxonomy Packages – and explore how they work.

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Automated Testing for Mobile App Development

November 22, 2016/in Development, Mobile, Software, Tools /by David McGahey

Robust and repeatable testing improves any software development project. If you’re creating a mobile app, testing is especially critical given the unpredictable range of end user devices and location variables. Altova MobileTogether includes sophisticated Automated Testing features that let developers:

Record a series of user actions as a test case
Replay the test case in the MobileTogether Designer Simulator environment
Deploy test cases to the MobileTogether Server for replay on a variety of client devices
Retrieve Test Run results from the server and compare differences

Automated Testing for Mobile Apps

You can even modify the app to fix a bug and run the test case again to validate the results of changes, which makes this an indispensable QA tool for your mobile app development process.

Scan Now: Barcodes in Mobile Apps

November 17, 2016/in Applications, Mobile /by Erin Cavanaugh

Barcodes are used in various industries to provide an optical, machine readable representation of data, usually related to an object they are placed on, such as a book, retail product, shipping package, or even the wrist of a patient in a hospital.

Recent developments in barcode technology include 2D codes that use shapes beyond the original bars (think of those QR codes you see on everything from magazine ads to cereal boxes). More significant, though, is the ability of smartphones and other mobile devices to scan barcodes using their built-in camera. Where in the past a specialized barcode scanner was required to read the coded information, now anyone can scan a code, greatly expanding the usefulness of barcodes for communicating data that can then be used a variety of ways.

Apps that can process barcode information are useful in a number of industries, and they can be used in apps that target workers as well as consumers. Let’s take a look at how easy it is to build an app that scans and processes barcodes in MobileTogether.

Barcodes in mobile apps

EDI Data Mapping with MapForce

November 15, 2016/in Data Integration /by David McGahey

Any computer industry standard that promotes reliability and clear communication between independent enterprises will have a long life. EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) originated in the 1960s to enable automated transactions between corporate computer systems. EDI remains in widespread use today and continues to evolve to meet modern requirements, under the administration of the UN/EDIFACT and ANSI standards bodies.

Altova MapForce supports EDI data mapping between EDI messages and XML, JSON, relational databases, flat files, Excel, or other data formats to bridge between commonly used information interchange and in-house technologies.

MapForce includes support for the latest EDIFACT versions 2015B and 2016A including the new VERMAS message. Mapping and translating EDIFACT messages to other usable data types for transfer, storage, and management is a common business requirement solved by MapForce.

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Tags: data mapping, EDI, EDIFACT, MapForce, VERMAS

MobileTogether Adds Barcodes, Automated Testing, and More

November 9, 2016/in Applications, Development, Mobile /by Erin Cavanaugh

It’s time for the latest release of MobileTogether, Altova’s cross-platform framework for building native, data-centric apps.

Coming a short five months after MobileTogether 2.2, version 3.0 ships with an impressive array of new functionality, from developer-requested features such as barcode scanning and automated testing support, to flexibility improvements in the form of multi-level stylesheets and print-to-file functionality, all of which are sure to set your apps apart from the crowd.

Let’s take a look at the new features in detail.

MapForce Supports SQL Merge When It’s the Right Tool for the Job

November 1, 2016/in Data Integration, Tools /by David McGahey

Large database tables can easily contain a million, even hundreds of millions of rows of data. Database administrators and others charged with maintaining such large datasets are always concerned about execution time for ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) operations, updates, and other SQL queries. To make these operations more efficient, some — but not all — database vendors implemented a SQL merge statement to insert or update rows of an existing table as a single bulk-insert statement rather than requiring individual statements for each row.

Altova MapForce automatically supports SQL merge when it is available for the target database. Let’s look at an example.

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