Technical specifications

Data records filed on magnetic media must match the specifications exactly. This permits us to efficiently process data filed by magnetic media, and eliminates our need to ask you for clarification.

The specifications are subject to change.

Note
If you need assistance, call 1-800-665-5164.

Changes as of December 18, 2002:

If you need to use any of the following special characters, please use a semi-colon after the characters as shown in the chart below:

Note: Although the above special characters are entered as 4 characters or more, they are considered to be only 1 character when input in the content area of an XML tag.

Changes as of November 21, 2002:

If you need to use special characters such as the < " > ' or & in the content area of the XML tags, you must enter them as follows:

Example: John Smith & Sons will be entered as John Smith &amp Sons

Changes as of October 24, 2002:

• Do not include any optional tags that are empty (i.e. which do not contain any information).
  

  Example: <init></init> is an optional tag.
  If you have no initial to report in this tag, do not include the tag in your submission.

• To properly capture international characters (e.g. the French character é) in XML files, you must save your file using one of the following character sets:

  Windows-1252
  ISO-8859-1
  UTF-8

The first line of your file should describe the character encoding that you used to create your file.

Example: If you used ISO-8859-1, then you would start with
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

Programming requirements

• Ensure that decimals are used when reporting the dollars and cent amounts for the return types that require them. Example: Amount being reported is ten dollars 10.00
• Do not use dollar signs in numeric fields.
• If there is more than one return summary in the submission, produce the summary records consistently after the related slips.
• The transmitter record must appear as the first record on the media filed.
• You are encouraged to test your submission against the published schema before sending your submission to CRA.
• Use only the space you need. For example:
  
  

  Employee First name (required)
  The maximum field length is 12 characters
  
  <gvn_nm>john</gvn_nm>

  Do not pad with extra spaces.

Things to Remember

If you are planning to submit your files on diskette, CD-ROM or DVD-ROM remember these points:

• Provide complete external labelling showing the transmitter's name and telephone number, the transmitter number and your submission file name.
• To be compatible, diskettes must meet the following specifications:
  • 3½ inch, two-sided double/high density with a 720Kb or 1.44Mb capacity; and
  • formatted so that they are compatible with the MS-DOS, PC-DOS, Windows 3.1, or Windows 9x operating systems.
• When burning your CD-ROM ensure the disk is finalized using an ISO 9660 encoding. This will ensure that the CRA can read your disk. To test if it is readable, place the disk in a standard CD-ROM drive and try to access it. If you can access it then send in the disk, if not then return the disk to your CD burner drive and follow your CD burning software manual to determine how to encode it in ISO 9660 format.
• When burning your DVD-ROM, ensure the disk is finalized using the UDF format. This will ensure that the CRA can read your disk.
• We expect to receive only one file per diskette, CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. You may include submissions for several filer account numbers in one file, provided each of the filer account numbers is separated by corresponding summary records.
• Diskettes, CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs will not be returned.
• The prescribed technical specifications will not be waived.