Comments on Nirav's Contemplations: How would you compare XMLs?

Hi, I want to find the delta between two xml file...

2008-05-05T02:02:22.600-04:00

Hi,
I want to find the delta between two xml files. The delta should be in another xml file which describes the added or removed elements. How to achieve this using XMLUnit?
Pls, Help me!!

Lea,If you mean how you would handle that situatio...

2007-11-28T18:00:54.242-05:00

Lea,

If you mean how you would handle that situation using XmlUnit then I would say you have to tweak it a bit, because I dont think it supports configurable exclusions.

If you are asking in general then its fairly easy to ignore tags in either DOM or SAX parsing.

Hope that helps.

Hi, i have a questions you might be able to help m...

2007-11-28T11:50:23.737-05:00

Hi,

i have a questions you might be able to help me with: i have to compare two xmls (lets say the reference and the new one), but i know some fields are NOT going to be the same, so i would like to ignore them.

How would you suggest doing this?

Thanks you!
Lea

I have used XMLUnit for this sort of task as well....

2007-11-14T13:02:50.580-05:00

I have used XMLUnit for this sort of task as well. I had to generate xml deltas and the library worked great with almost no tweaking.

Hi Stuart, XMLUnit does ignore whitespace while co...

2007-11-14T12:26:24.010-05:00

Hi Stuart,

XMLUnit does ignore whitespace while comparing (org.custommonkey.xmlunit.XMLUnit#setIgnoreWhitespace).

But I seem to agree with you, XSLT would be the ultimate tool for this job.

Hi, we had a very similar requirement on a project...

2007-11-14T11:53:34.138-05:00

Hi, we had a very similar requirement on a project I was recently involved with. The project included implementing a bunch of document based web services. We wrote unit tests that called the web services and then compared the returned document against an expected response. We couldn't guarantee element order, white space equivalence, etc. so tried XMLUnit without much success. In the end, I wrote

Thanks for the feedback Nicholas,I knew about orde...

2007-11-13T16:24:04.538-05:00

Thanks for the feedback Nicholas,

I knew about ordering problems while comparing ordered node list, fortunately for me though, node ordering is guaranteed by the source XML (which is generated) so I can compare it without deep node/attribute comparisons, possible guesses and meta-data.

XMLUnit doesn't handle this case.

I did have an application where I had to automatic...

2007-11-13T16:16:19.731-05:00

I did have an application where I had to automatically merge two XML files as part of an upgrade (so that the new file got the new fields.) In theory it was simple. If an element was missing add it and all its sub-nodes. If an element had the same name in both files then recurse for all its children.

The problems arose when some elements actually were ordered list. Merging would