XMLUnit: Element and Attribute ordering problem

[Norman Meister]

I have a question regarding “Similar” and “Identical”. In the following example given on XMLUnit help page:

<author>Dan Brown</author>
<category></category>

And

<category></category>
<author>Dan Brown</author>

The output comes out to be:

Similar? true
Identical? false
***********************
Expected sequence of child nodes ’5′ but was ’7′ – comparing at /books[1]/book[1]/author[1] to at /books[1]/book[1]/author[1]
***********************
***********************
Expected sequence of child nodes ’7′ but was ’5′ – comparing at /books[1]/book[1]/category[1] to at /books[1]/book[1]/category[1]
***********************

My question how can we “NOT” include in the output such non-identical information? My problem is that I have a long xml documents to compare. There are cases, where the differences are related to orderring and in addition to others.

But when I get the total output, it gets kind of difficult to find the actual differences (non-orderring) related.

I have to manually skip the non-important information (orderring differences) from the actual differences for example if anything is missing in the reference documents or have different content etc.

Have said that, I read somewhere that such "orderring" problems can be solved with my own "custom DifferenceListener".

So I did the following, (the whole class):

import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.StringWriter;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.List;

import org.w3c.dom.Node;
import javax.xml.transform.OutputKeys;
import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerException;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;

import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.DetailedDiff;
import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.Diff;
import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.Difference;
import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.DifferenceConstants;
import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.DifferenceListener;
import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.ElementNameAndAttributeQualifier;
import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.ElementNameAndTextQualifier;
import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.ElementNameQualifier;
import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.MatchTracker;
import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.NodeDetail;
import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.XMLUnit;
import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.examples.MultiLevelElementNameAndTextQualifier;
import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.examples.RecursiveElementNameAndTextQualifier;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;

public class XMLComparator {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		URL url1 = XMLComparator.class.getResource("reference.xml");
		URL url2 = XMLComparator.class.getResource("comparison.xml");
		FileReader fr1 = null;
		FileReader fr2 = null;
		try {
			fr1 = new FileReader(url1.getPath());
			fr2 = new FileReader(url2.getPath());
		} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}

		XMLUnit.setIgnoreComments(Boolean.TRUE);
		XMLUnit.setIgnoreWhitespace(Boolean.TRUE);
		XMLUnit.setNormalizeWhitespace(Boolean.TRUE);
		XMLUnit.setIgnoreDiffBetweenTextAndCDATA(Boolean.TRUE);
		XMLUnit.setIgnoreAttributeOrder(Boolean.TRUE);
		
		XMLUnit.setCompareUnmatched(Boolean.FALSE); 
		
		
		try {
			Diff diff = new Diff(fr1, fr2);
						
			diff.overrideDifferenceListener(new DifferenceListener() {
				
				@Override
				public void skippedComparison(Node arg0, Node arg1) {
					// TODO Auto-generated method stub
				}
				
				@Override
				 public int differenceFound(Difference diff) { 
		             if (diff.getId() == DifferenceConstants.CHILD_NODELIST_SEQUENCE_ID) 
			     {
		             return RETURN_IGNORE_DIFFERENCE_NODES_IDENTICAL;  
		             }
	                    
		             return RETURN_ACCEPT_DIFFERENCE;
		         }
				
				
				
			});
						
			System.out.println(" Similar ? " + diff.similar());
			System.out.println(" Identical ? " + diff.identical());
			
			

			DetailedDiff detDiff = new DetailedDiff(diff);

			detDiff.overrideMatchTracker(new MatchTrackerImpl());
			detDiff.overrideElementQualifier(new ElementNameAndTextQualifier());
			
			

			List differences = detDiff.getAllDifferences();
			

			for (Object object : differences) {
				Difference difference = (Difference) object;
				System.out.println("***********************");
				System.out.println(difference);

				System.out.println("***********************");
			}

		} catch (SAXException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	}

}

class MatchTrackerImpl implements MatchTracker {

	public void matchFound(Difference difference) {
		if (difference != null) {
			NodeDetail controlNode = difference.getControlNodeDetail();
			NodeDetail testNode = difference.getTestNodeDetail();

			String controlNodeValue = printNode(controlNode.getNode());
			String testNodeValue = printNode(testNode.getNode());

			if (controlNodeValue != null) {
				// System.out.println("####################");
				// System.out.println("Control Node: " + controlNodeValue);
			}
			if (testNodeValue != null) {
				// System.out.println("Test Node: " + testNodeValue);
				// System.out.println("####################");
			}
		}
	}

	private static String printNode(Node node) {
		if (node != null && node.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) {
			StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
			try {
				Transformer t = TransformerFactory.newInstance()
						.newTransformer();
				t.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.OMIT_XML_DECLARATION, "yes");
				t.transform(new DOMSource(node), new StreamResult(sw));
			} catch (TransformerException te) {
				System.out.println("nodeToString Transformer Exception");
			}
			return sw.toString();

		}
		return null;
	}
}

reference.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<UsernameToken>
	<OtherSrvcName>EXCURSION_AND_TICKETS</OtherSrvcName>
	<OtherSrvcName>TRAVELGUIDE</OtherSrvcName>
</UsernameToken>

comparison.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<UsernameToken>
	<OtherSrvcName>TRAVELGUIDE</OtherSrvcName>
	<OtherSrvcName>EXCURSION_AND_TICKETS</OtherSrvcName>
</UsernameToken>

The output:

Similar ? false
Identical ? false

This to some degree resolved my original problem, but my question is why Similar is false? Shouldn't it be 'true' ?

Secondly, on my slightly changing the XMLs, the entire output then yielded the same original response, which i am not interested in.

reference.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<UsernameToken>
	<OtherSrvcPref>
		<OtherSrvcName>EXCURSION_AND_TICKETS</OtherSrvcName>
	</OtherSrvcPref>
	<OtherSrvcPref>
		<OtherSrvcName>TRAVELGUIDE</OtherSrvcName>
	</OtherSrvcPref>
</UsernameToken>

comparision.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<UsernameToken>
	<OtherSrvcPref>
		<OtherSrvcName>TRAVELGUIDE</OtherSrvcName>
	</OtherSrvcPref>
	<OtherSrvcPref>
		<OtherSrvcName>EXCURSION_AND_TICKETS</OtherSrvcName>
	</OtherSrvcPref>
</UsernameToken>

Output:

Similar ? false
Identical ? false
***********************
Expected presence of child node 'OtherSrvcName' but was 'null' - comparing <OtherSrvcName...> at /UsernameToken[1]/OtherSrvcPref[1]/OtherSrvcName[1] to at null
***********************
***********************
Expected presence of child node 'null' but was 'OtherSrvcName' - comparing at null to <OtherSrvcName...> at /UsernameToken[1]/OtherSrvcPref[1]/OtherSrvcName[1]
***********************
***********************
Expected presence of child node 'OtherSrvcName' but was 'null' - comparing <OtherSrvcName...> at /UsernameToken[1]/OtherSrvcPref[2]/OtherSrvcName[1] to at null
***********************
***********************
Expected presence of child node 'null' but was 'OtherSrvcName' - comparing at null to <OtherSrvcName...> at /UsernameToken[1]/OtherSrvcPref[2]/OtherSrvcName[1]
***********************

Now why am i getting the 'Expected presence...' messages in the output? Shouldn't it just produce the same output as in the previous case, i.e.

Similar ? false
Identical ? false

I don't understand this difference in the behaviour of the output? Could someone please help me out here..

Thanks.