How to test XML file using RSpec?

Question

I have an RSS feed that I am writing an RSpec test for. I want to test that the XML document has the correct nodes and structure. Unfortunately, I can't find any good examples of how to do this in a clean way. I have only found some half-implemented solutions and outdated blog posts. How can I test the structure of an XML document using RSpec?

Answer 1

Hi I can recommend you to use custom matcher for this.

 require 'nokogiri' 
    RSpec::Matchers.define :have_xml do |xpath, text|   
      match do |body|
        doc = Nokogiri::XML::Document.parse(body)
        nodes = doc.xpath(xpath)
        nodes.empty?.should be_false
        if text
          nodes.each do |node|
            node.content.should == text
          end
        end
        true   
      end

      failure_message_for_should do |body|
        "expected to find xml tag #{xpath} in:\n#{body}"   
      end

      failure_message_for_should_not do |response|
        "expected not to find xml tag #{xpath} in:\n#{body}"   
      end

      description do
        "have xml tag #{xpath}"   
      end 
   end

Full example can be found here https://gist.github.com/Fivell/8025849

Answer 2

No longer necessary to roll your own. We deal this problem daily, using the equivalent-xml matcher at https://github.com/mbklein/equivalent-xml .

require 'rspec/matchers'
require 'equivalent-xml'
...
expect(node_1).to be_equivalent_to(node_2)

Has options for edge cases like whitespace-preservation.

Your other option is to use a formal XSD template for strict validation.

Answer 3

context 'POST #join' do
    it 'does successfully hit join xml route' do
      post :join,
        format: :xml
      response.content_type.should == "application/xml"
      response.should be_ok
    end
end

This worked for me. I didn't realize I had to pass format: :xml. My join route responds to /join.xml and I was testing that this was successful.

Answer 4

Give Approvals a try, it works with rspec, I have used for testing Json payload, and it is used with Minitest in exercism.io

EDIT

  it "returns available traffic information around me" do
    post '/search_traffic_around', {location: [-87.688219, 41.941149]}.to_json
    output = last_response.body
    options = {format: :json, name: 'traffic_around_location'}
    Approvals.verify(output,options)
  end

the JSON I am verifying against is located in spec/fixtures folder named traffic_around_location.approved.json

Implementation where the above snippet is pulled from is available here

How it works is you supply it an expected Payload, JSON, XML, TXT and HTML this I am sure it supports in spec/fixtures and when you run the test it checks to confirm that the payload received matches the expected(approved) payload the test would pass if it matches else the test fails