[Xmlunit-general] Matching ordered and unordered collections

[Naresh B. <NB...@sa...>]

I am a newbie to XMLUnit. I was trying to match the following pieces of
XML where

1) forums is an unordered collection for forum objects
2) forum is an unordered collection of thread objects
3) thread is an ordered collection of message objects

Control
=======
<forums>
    <forum>
        <name>forum1</name>
        <thread>
            <title>thread11</title>
            <message>msg111</message>
            <message>msg112</message>
        </thread>
        <thread>
            <title>thread12</title>
            <message>msg121</message>
            <message>msg122</message>
        </thread>
    </forum>
    <forum>
        <name>forum2</name>
        <thread>
            <title>thread21</title>
            <message>msg211</message>
            <message>msg212</message>
        </thread>
        <thread>
            <title>thread22</title>
            <message>msg221</message>
            <message>msg222</message>
        </thread>
    </forum>
</forums>

Test
====
<forums>
    <forum>
        <name>forum2</name>
        <thread>
            <title>thread22</title>
            <message>msg221</message>
            <message>msg222</message>
        </thread>
        <thread>
            <title>thread21</title>
            <message>msg211</message>
            <message>msg212</message>
        </thread>
    </forum>
    <forum>
        <name>forum1</name>
        <thread>
            <title>thread12</title>
            <message>msg121</message>
            <message>msg122</message>
        </thread>
        <thread>
            <title>thread11</title>
            <message>msg111</message>
            <message>msg112</message>
        </thread>
    </forum>
</forums>
 
1) What is the best way to specify this in XMLUnit? Here's my attempt:

   Diff diff = new Diff(control, test);
   diff.overrideElementQualifier(new
RecursiveElementNameAndTextQualifier());
   System.out.println(diff.toString());

This prints the following difference (obviously not what I want):

[different] Expected text value 'forum1' but was 'forum2' - comparing
<name ...>forum1</name> at /forums[1]/forum[1]/name[1]/text()[1] to
<name ...>forum2</name> at /forums[1]/forum[1]/name[1]/text()[1]

2) What's interesting is that if I take out threads and messages from
the data above, then diff.similar() returns true. So why does the
addition of threads and messages choke at the forum level?

3) Is there a general way to specify ordered/unordered collections at
different levels of nesting? I am trying to write a testing framework
for my application and it would be nice to specify the matching criteria
flexibly.

Thanks.
Naresh Bhatia