Altova delivered this week MissionKit 2009, a suite of database, UML and XML tools. In addition to that, Altova has added Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) support across its products.

MissionKit is comprised of new versions of Altova's DatabaseSpy query and design tool, DiffDog merge utility, MapForce data mapping tool, StyleVision graphical stylesheet design utility, UModel Unified Modeling Language tool, and XMLSpy XML editor.

Out of those products, MapForce, StyleVision and XMLSpy offer support for viewing, editing, validating, mapping and publishing XBRL data.

XBRL is an emerging XML-based standard to define and exchange business and financial performance information, and XBRL International, a not-for-profit consortium, governs it. Governments, including the United States, have mandated its use for corporate filings.

Altova's objective is to provide developers and database administrators with tools to work with XBRL data from various angles, said Alexander Falk, president and CEO of Altova. XMLSpy has a visual taxonomy editor for creating XBRL-based filings, and MapForce derives XBRL from accounting data to produce reports.

Taxonomies in XBRL provide a set of tags that represent Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for financial reporting.

"Our approach [with MapForce] is a little different than standard XBRL tools," which tag financial reports as an afterthought, Falk said. "That is fundamentally the wrong approach.

"Organizations have all their accounting data stored … Why not take that and directly derive XBRL from it, and then generate the report?" he posited. "Inherently, the tagging of existing files as an afterthought is labor intensive, even if tools automate part of it."

Altova also adjusted how StyleVision designs tables for the presentation of XBRL data, he said. It can output the reports into HTML, PDF, RTF and Word 2007 (Office Open XML) formats.

All of Altova's products now support the XLink and XPointer languages for creating hyperlinks in XML documents as a consequence of supporting XBRL, Falk noted.

Other improvements in the suite include functionality for working with the Health Level 7 (HL7) standard in MapForce, new database differencing capabilities in DatabaseSpy and DiffDog, and sequence diagram generation in UModel.

MapForce supports HL7 in anticipation of the new U.S. Presidential Administration's "huge push" to automate healthcare records, said Falk. It implements HL7 version 3.0 and its previous Electronic Database Interchange-based versions.

DatabaseSpy and DiffDog are now capable of comparing and merging database content; individual tables or multiple database tables within a schema can be compared regardless of the database type. Differences can be merged implicitly, said Falk, who added that comparing database content can be a good way to uncover why an application may work in a staging environment but not a production environment.

Lastly, the sequence diagramming feature in UModel permits developers reverse engineer source code that is written in C#, Java or Visual Basic.

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