Invalid XML path keys still evaluate in Rest Assured

Question

My example web service is returning following XML.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<errorResponse>
<errorCode>Wrong ID</errorCode>
<errorId>2</errorId>
</errorResponse>

Following tests are passed.

response.then().body("errorResponse.errorId", Matchers.is("2"));
response.then().body("errorResponse.errorCode", Matchers.is("Wrong ID"));

response.then().body("errorResponse1.errorCode", Matchers.is("Wrong ID"));
response.then().body("errorResponse2.errorCode", Matchers.is("Wrong ID"));

I understand that first two tests are fine, what I am not getting is why the last two are getting passed?

Answer 1

Rest-assured uses its xml-path library to evaluate your hamcrest matcher and that library contains the XMLAssertion class which does the actual checking.

The source can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/rest-assured/rest-assured/blob/master/xml-path/src/main/groovy/io/restassured/assertion/XMLAssertion.groovy

At line 60 of this file you can see it removes the part of the search key before the first dot, because it recognizes we're evaluating from a root node.

Hence your key:

"errorResponse3.errorCode" 

becomes

".errorCode"

So it turns out it doesn't matter what this initial path looks like, it assumes it's the name of the root node and discards it anyway.