[Xmlunit-general] Adding a new type of Difference?

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

Hi,

on the help forum there is a thread started by a user who wants to
highlight all differences between two XML docs in some kind of UI.

He/she is using DetailedDiff and assumes all differences would be
flagged - I agree with this expectation.

A problem arises if the test document contains more nodes than the
control document.  XMLUnit will tell you the number of children is
different on the parent of that node, but there is no difference that
would reference the new node - so there is no programatic way to tell
which node is new.

We already have a Difference for "attribute name not found" and I'd
like to introduce one for "element name not found" and I'd like to
make it work symmetrically.

The later means that in cases where the control document contains
nodes not present in the test document the type of difference would
change.  This would be a backwards incompatible change (right now
you'd get a "element tag name is different") but only affect people
using DetailedDiff.

What do you think?

Stefan