Re: [Xmlunit-general] xml diff algorithm

[Stefan B. <bo...@ap...>]

On 2010-05-28, Johannes Lichtenberger wrote:

> I've got two HTML documents (serialized as XML) which have slightly
> different structures at the end because of a stylesheet template rule
> based on attributes (and attribute order isn't defined in XML documents
> I think):

Order of XML attributes is supposed to be irrelevant, still XMLUnit (1.x
for Java) has a difference type for it, but it is considered
recoverable.  I don't see any attributes on your HTML anyway.

>       <h4>CATEGORY I</h4>
>       <table>
>          <tr>
>             <td>DESC</td>
>             <td>Paperback</td>
>          </tr>
>          <tr>
>             <td>CODE</td>
>             <td>P</td>
>          </tr>
>       </table>

> vs.

>       ...
>       <h4>CATEGORY I</h4>
>       <table>
>          <tr>
>             <td>CODE</td>
>             <td>P</td>
>          </tr>
>          <tr>
>             <td>DESC</td>
>             <td>Paperback</td>
>          </tr>
>       </table>

> You can see that only the tr-elements are exchanged,

It's a bit more complex than that.  You have to look at the <tr>'s
grandchildren (the text nodes inside the <td> elements) to see which
<tr>s to match.

> but assertXMLEqual fales, even if I change the table structure to
> unordered lists, so I assume it's not doable

XMLUnit needs help from you to know which <tr>s to compare with each
other.  This is the purpose of the ElementQualifier
<http://xmlunit.sourceforge.net/userguide/html/ar01s03.html#ElementQualifier>.
In your case an ElementNameAndTextQualifier wouldn't be enough since you
need to match <tr>'s based on the text of their children.
RecursiveElementNameAndTextQualifier may work.

Stefan