Comparing XML in a JUnit test

Today I tried to compare 2 XML documents in a JUnit test. One was created with Altova's MapForce, the other was the result of a new XmlBeans document (BTW, both are nice products). Notice that these XML documents use a slightly different notation for the main namespace:

Document one:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Message xmlns="http://www.a.nl/a10.xsd" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="C:/longpath/a10.xsd"> <MessageHeader>....

Document two:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <a:Message xmlns:a="http://www.a.nl/a10.xsd"> <a:MessageHeader>....

Here is what I tried:

1. org.w3c.dom.Document.equals. Well, that goes nowhere.

2. org.dom4j.Document.equals. Same.

3. XMLUtil's XMLAssert.assertXMLEqual. Bummer, works alright, but it says that Message and a:Message are different and they are not (they're in the same namespace!).

4. Juxy's XMLComparator.assertXMLEquals. No go, same result.

5. I took a short look at the site of XSLTunit. It says that XSLTunit is a proof of concept. Furthermore, this one is also targetted at XSLT testing. So I decided to skip it.

6. Reading a bit closer I noticed that XMLUtil 1.0 released in April 2003 (wow, that's old), has a followup: XMLUtil 1.1beta1 released in April 2007 (wow, that's new). The website says they fixed the namespace thing! Unfortunately they didn't (yet, I hope).

7. The final solution: with some String.replaces, I just removed the namespace stuff and the schema location from the documents. XMLUtil 1.0 now works nicely with very good diff messages.

Update 2007-05-24 I was quite wrong. XmlUnit does notice the differences in namespace usage (and puts a message in the exception), but it does not fail until it sees a real difference. The real difference turned out to be whitespace. By adding the code added below, the differences disappear.

XMLUnit.setControlParser("org.apache.xerces.jaxp.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl"); XMLUnit.setTestParser("org.apache.xerces.jaxp.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl"); XMLUnit.setSAXParserFactory("org.apache.xerces.jaxp.SAXParserFactoryImpl"); XMLUnit.setTransformerFactory("org.apache.xalan.processor.TransformerFactoryImpl"); XMLUnit.setIgnoreWhitespace(true);