Subject: Re: [xsl] Friday challenge: XSLT thats creates XPaths for meaningfully equivalent comparisons of XML files From: "Andrew Welch" <andrew.j.welch@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:00:50 +0100 |
Some quick thoughts:
> <checkXML> > <xml src="file:/C:/test.xml"> > <check>/root[1]/foo[1]/text[1] = 'foo'</check> > <check>/root[1]/foo[1]/@fooatt = 'att'</check> > <check>/root[1]/bar[1]/text[1] = 'bar'</check> > <check>/root[1]/bar[2]/text[1] = 'baz'</check> > </xml> > </checkXML>
1. Checking if the above XPath expressions all evaluate to true() is not a guarantee that the two documents are the same. One of them could be a prefix (has all of the first N nodes in document order of the other document, but the other document has still more nodes after the "first N nodes"). Therefore, an essential XPath expression that is missing is: count(//node() | //@* | //namespace::*) = N
This XPath expression illustrates also that according to our definition of "document equality" some of its subexpressions and the right-hand-side of the equality test above may differ when "equality" is defined in a different way -- for example, do all attribute and namespace nodes matter, do we take into account comment nodes and/or processing instructions, ..., etc.
There are even such people, according to whom the following are different:
<someElement/>
and
<someElement></someElement>
and a lot of similar purely lexical differences (escaped text or CDATA, double or single quotes, explicit declaration of a namespace node inherited from the parent, order of attributes, ..., etc.)
The point of my exercise is not to guarantee that xml documents are canonically identically, but that they are meaningfully equivalent. I'm not talking about lexical similarity, but infoset similarity, think HTML output.
Given the task of upgrading a set of XSLT 1.0 transforms to XSLT 2.0, how do you ensure the output remains consistent after the upgrade? How can you be sure that the "improvements" you've made haven't broken any existing transforms? A canonical set of comparisons would flood you with insignificant results, so you're more concerned with "meaningful equivalent" results. Perhaps I have the wrong approach here...
I do use XSDs and Selenium tests, but I think there's room for another tool that allows XSD, XPaths and XSLTs to check the correctness of the XML.
2. What is even more important, even if all issues described in 1. above have been solved/agreed-upon, the fact that the result of an XSLT 2.0 transformation is the same as the result of an XSLT 1.0 transformation of a given document *does not guarantee* that the two transformations will have the same result when applied on another xml document.
To put it in other words, the proposed tool will be effective in showing that two transformations do not produce the same results, but it cannot be used in ascertaining that two transformations will always produce the same result.
I agree, but I'm talking about infoset equivalence rather than lexical equivalence.
cheers andrew
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