Re: [Xmlunit-general] XMLUnit2 - dealing with XML input

[James A. <jam...@gm...>]

2009/4/20 Stefan Bodewig <bo...@ap...>:
> Well, it turned out that my ideas are not really that big or even
> complex.
>
> I want a single unified type to represent any type of XML data that
> any part of XMLUnit2 deals with - where any part is the difference
> engine, the validator or the XPath engine.  XMLUnit 1.x has many
> overloads with Document, String, InputStream and InputSource
> parameters and this doesn't really help.
>
> Together with this unified type we'd need adapters and maybe a
> convenient fluent builder.
>
> For Java it turns out such a unified type already exists:
> javax.xml.transform.Source which is used by JAXP's validation API (and
> transformations, obviously) and can be used by JAXP's XPath API in a
> simple way via SAXSource.sourceToInputSource.  The only piece that may
> be a bit more complex to implement would be the difference engine but
> we can always perform an identity transform with a DOMResult as
> target.  The same is true for XPath and a SAXResult.
>
> org.xml.sax.InputSouce could be a choice that would be almost as
> compelling, but it looks as if Source was the way forward in JAXP
> given the validation API and StAXSource in the newer versions.
>
> .NET doesn't really have a type like this.  XmlReader probably gets
> closest but it's a class rather than an interface which may constrict
> some things we'd like to do.
>
> I propose to use something like
>
> public interface ISource {
>    XmlReader Reader {get;}
> }
>
> instead and implement that for XmlDocument, Stream and TextReader.
> The XMLUnit2 APIs would then look similar in that they'd use
> (I)Source.
>
> The builder I envision is somethng along the lines of
>
> Input.fromFile("some/path").withEntityResolver(someResolver).build();
>
> Comments?
>
> Stefan
>

Sounds reasonable. I would love to be able to contribute in terms of
(Java) code but I'm a bit swamped for the foreseeable few months.
Happy to bounce ideas around though.

Cheers,

James