XMLUnit - Ignoring 'id' attribute in comparison

Question

I am currently working with XMLUnit and I am wondering if there is way to configure it to ignore only the id attribute of the tags I want to compare.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Fargone

See #1242093 – Edifice

Answer 1

I am gonna try to implement my own DifferenceListener to handle this need (see this post). Gonna post the result soon. It seems to work, gonna post the implementation tomorrow.

Fargone

could you send example, please? – Derina

You should take a look at this post (#1242093) it's pretty much like the listener I implemented. – Fargone

Answer 2

The solution is quite simple. You can configure your DifferenceEngine to handle ATTR_VALUE differences. Write custom difference listener class which implements DifferenceListener:

class IgnoreIDsDifferenceListener implements DifferenceListener {
    private static final int[] IGNORE_VALUES = new int[] {
            DifferenceConstants.ATTR_VALUE.getId(),
    };

    private boolean isIgnoredDifference(Difference difference) {
        int differenceId = difference.getId();
        for (int i=0; i < IGNORE_VALUES.length; ++i) {
            if (differenceId == IGNORE_VALUES[i]) {
                return true;
            }
        }
        return false;
    }

    public int differenceFound(Difference difference) {
        if (isIgnoredDifference(difference)) {
            return RETURN_IGNORE_DIFFERENCE_NODES_IDENTICAL;
        } else {
            return RETURN_ACCEPT_DIFFERENCE;
        }
    }

    public void skippedComparison(Node control, Node test) {
    }
}

The required thing here is to check whether the attribute name is "id". Standard Java DOM functionality could help. But I prefer to do this by the means of regular expressions:

String controlNode = difference.getControlNodeDetail().getNode().toString();
controlNode .matches("^id=\".*\"")

P.S. See also: http://xmlunit.sourceforge.net/api/org/custommonkey/xmlunit/Difference.html

Adai