Re: [Xmlunit-general] xmlunit.org

[Harald B. <bra...@gm...>]

Hi,

I have a few questions about the DifferenceEvaluators:

>> But I think that one DifferenceEvaluator is not enough.
>> At least DifferenceEvaluators.Default should always be part of,
>> otherwise there is no ComparisonResult.SIMILAR.
>
>IMHO this is something the user of the API should take care of. If they
>want to have DEFAULT's behaviour then they should include it explicitly.
>
You think, that the code should look like the following?:
----------
Diff myDiff = DiffBuilder.compare(control).withTest(test)
		.withDifferenceEvaluator(DifferenceEvaluators.first(
			DifferenceEvaluators.Default,
			new IgnoreAttributeDifferenceEvaluator("attr")))
		.checkForSimilar()
		.build();
----------
I think "checkForSimilar" will be the preferred method to compare two XMLs.
But checkForSimilar() makes no sense without "DifferenceEvaluators.Default".
On the other site I can't think of a situation where the "DifferenceEvaluators.Default" must be ignored to get a special goal?
  Even this rare cases could simply be handled with a method ".deactivateDefaultDifferenceEvaluator()"

I checked in the UnitTest:
https://github.com/brabenetz/xmlunit/commit/4a8e5eb676809344a6dbaf814289a6495db80728

>> But then I need a method like DifferenceEvaluators.inSequence(...)
>> instead of DifferenceEvaluators.first(...).
>
>first() picks the first that changes the outcome, what would be the
>result of inSequence()?
>
Simply passes the result to the next evaluator.
Reason: The custom DifferenceEvaluator should also be triggered (e.g.: for Ignore) even if a Node was marked as "similar" before.
		And maybe the custom DifferenceEvaluator want to check if the Difference was "similar".


>> I also think about a general SimpleIgnoreNodesDifferenceEvaluator
>> (ignore some nodes) or a SimpleBigDecimalNodesDifferenceEvaluator
>> (which evaluates "1" similar "1.00") implementations.
>
>The first one hints at the missing feature of ignoring parts completely.
>I don't think DifferenceEvaluator is the best place for this. The
>second one sounds like a third jar of xmlunit-library rather than -core?
>
Yes, it could be a third jar of xmlunit-library.
What you mean with "DifferenceEvaluator is not the best place for this"? Is there another way?


Thanks,
Harald