Re: [xsl] Verifying large XSL transform output

[Matthew Stoeffler <Matthew.Stoeffler@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Greg.

Thought occurs to me about a possible short cut to this.  What if your main
transform added a @srcPath to each new element node you generated, where the
attribute contains the xpath location of the node that it came from.  Your
transform setup just has a identify script that follows that strips out the
attributes, but also writes all of them out as text, saving the paths in a
text file.  You then run the xmlstarlet el command on the original source to a
text file. Sort both path files and compare.  Would that work?  It sounds more
generalized for multiple projects.  I haven't attempted it yet, so it might be
more work than I think, but hopefully less work than writing two full
transforms.  I mean, my transform scripts for the current project are several
thousand lines combined.

m./


On Feb 11, 2014, at 3:29 PM, Greg Hunt wrote:

Another vote here for round tripping and comparing the result with the
source using a specifically built comparison tool.  I have a project
under way right now doing that.  Its a non-trivial amount of work, but
you have to test somehow, and I don't know how you would write and
execute comprehensive test cases otherwise. The comparison tool will
be a lot simpler than the transformations, so it is easy to test
manually.  This approach has the advantage that the entire body of
input XML can be the test data, leaving no corner cases uncovered.