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Use InSpec XML resource with XPath to test attribute values

  • Dec 21, 2017

Challenge

Find an XML nodes with an attribute key called name and whose value equals url. For the found node test if a different attribute’s actual value matches the expected value.

Test Data

database.xml (Store as /tmp/database.xml for test purposes)

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/util http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util.xsd" default-lazy-init="true">
<bean id="dataSource" class="com.myapplication.base.persistency.support.DecoratedDataSource" parent="oracleBaseDataSource" scope="singleton" lazy-init="true">
	<property name="type" ref="ORACLE_11" />
	<property name="name" value="MYAPPLICATION" />
	<property name="url" value="jdbc:oracle:thin:@databaseserver.domain.tld:1521/DBO.DOMAIN.TLD" />
	<property name="username" value="MYUSERNAME" />
	<property name="password">
	<bean class="com.mycorp.core.util.crypt.PasswordHelper" factory-method="decrypt">
	<constructor-arg value="" />
</bean>
</property>
</bean>
</beans>

Solution

I tested after attribute support was merged into InSpec with PR #2423 and got an error because I was still comparing the result with a string literal rather than an array:

  File /tmp/database.xml
     ✔  should exist
  XML /tmp/database.xml
     ∅  ["//property[@name='url']/@value"] should eq "jdbc:oracle:thin:@databaseserver.domain.tld:1521/DBO.DOMAIN.TLD"

     expected: "jdbc:oracle:thin:@databaseserver.domain.tld:1521/DBO.DOMAIN.TLD"
          got: ["jdbc:oracle:thin:@databaseserver.domain.tld:1521/DBO.DOMAIN.TLD"]

     (compared using ==)


Test Summary: 1 successful, 1 failure, 0 skipped

But since the eval is returning an array I simply switched to cmp and it works:

  File /tmp/database.xml
     ✔  should exist
  XML /tmp/database.xml
     ✔  ["//property[@name='url']/@value"] should cmp == "jdbc:oracle:thin:@databaseserver.domain.tld:1521/DBO.DOMAIN.TLD"

Test Summary: 2 successful, 0 failures, 0 skipped

The test itself looks like this:

testfile   = '/tmp/database.xml'
datasource = 'jdbc:oracle:thin:@databaseserver.domain.tld:1521/DBO.DOMAIN.TLD'

if file(testfile).exist?
  describe xml(testfile) do
    its(['//property[@name="url"]/@value']) { should eq datasource }
  end
end

The @value in the test means: return the value of the node’s attribute called value. Replace it with whatever attribute’s value you want to query.

The Docs have been updated to showcase the syntax: https://www.inspec.io/docs/reference/resources/xml/

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