Report Elements
A component is used to group facts in a meaningful way within a filing, for example to build a BalanceSheet or an IncomeStatement.
These grouped facts can be shown to developers or to business users in several fancy ways: fact tables, spreadsheets. These will be shown in the next chapters.
But before, we go into these, we need to give a few more details about what the internal structure of a component: the building blocks that hold the facts together, like glue.
A component is made of so-called Report Elements. Report Elements are metadata.
API Reference
We provide a complete reference to the REST API for report elements.
Spreadsheet analogy
Report elements can be seen as header (row or column) cells in a spreadsheet. Line items, abstracts and concepts are most often used as row headers, while dimensions and members are used as column headers.