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I am working on building an iOS app in Objective-C that requires data to be pulled from the SEC's Edgar Filings database. How can I integrate a search field into my code that would call on a specific company's financial statement information to display in the app? Any helpful advise or resources would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

de3z1e
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  • This might be difficult, as there is no standardized way to find this information. The blog post at http://gepsio.wordpress.com/2013/08/24/edgar-filing-urls-using-ticker-and-date/ describes some of the problems encountered when attempting to fins a filing using a standard mechanism. – JeffFerguson Nov 25 '13 at 13:30
  • Jeff, thanks for the helpful information. So let's say I initially want to integrate only the Dow 30 into my app and construct a cross reference list such as the one mentioned in the linked post. How would I then integrate the search functionality into an iOS app built on Objective-C? – de3z1e Dec 03 '13 at 19:58
  • To be able to search through any corpus, you need to index its documents which is typically done on a server which is then queried to retrieve results to be displayed to the user. This would be both difficult and prohibitively resource intensive to attempt in an iOS app. I might be able to assist you better if I knew what data you wanted to index and search. – Rob Raisch Dec 04 '13 at 07:15
  • I also have a fairly comprehensive ticker to SEC CIK db if that would help. – Rob Raisch Dec 04 '13 at 07:17
  • Let's say I want to pull down income statement data from the most recent 4 quarters and give the user an option of displaying relevant information such as revenue trends, operating profit trends, and net income trends. – de3z1e Apr 12 '14 at 01:45

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Using CIK is probably the best way to search for specific company filings.

One way is to have your app screen scrape the results using some of the functions available in WebKit like evaluateJavaScript. Pulling information from income statements and identifying the individual income statement line items would be very difficult because the labels would be inconsistent among companies.

In your code, you could format the http web string for an Edgar 10-K filing which contains the income statement like so

let CIK="1652044" let SECFormName = "Form10K"

let URLStr = "https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=&CIK=" + CIK + "&type=" + SECFormName + "&owner=include&count=40&action=getcurrent"

The above is in Swift syntax and conversion to Objective C is minor.

TurboPascal
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