Table Constraints 1.0 nearly finished
XBRL International’s Table Constraints 1.0 specification has reached a key milestone, being approved as a Proposed Recommendation. Thank you for the hard work of the OIM Working Group for this accomplishment.
Table Constraints are an extension of xBRL-CSV, enabling very efficient basic validation checks of tabular data. XBRL Formula Rules provide a powerful validation mechanism for most use cases, but can be too resource-intensive on large datasets with millions of rows – as in some banking and insurance collections. Table Constraints makes it possible to capture many common rules in a manner that leverages the tabular nature of the data in order to provide certain important validation checks orders of magnitude faster than has been previously possible.
The Proposed Recommendation represents significant progress. It is the last stage in development before the official Recommendation, meaning that we now have a near-final version with multiple independent software implementations, incorporating substantial feedback and testing results.
Under XBRL International’s standards process, a Proposed Recommendation can only be published once we have two independent implementation that pass the specification’s conformance suite. The spec has reached that point.
A primer is available in the recent guidance on Table Constraints here. The design document is here. The specification is here.
