<< Checking XML QuickTest Professional | Creating XML Checkpoints >>

About Checking XML

Checking XML

By adding XML checkpoints to your test scripts, you can check the contents of XML data files
individually or as part of your Web application.

This chapter describes

Creating XML Checkpoints

Modifying XML Checkpoints

Analyzing XML Checkpoints Results

Using XML Scripting Methods to Enhance Your Test

About Checking XML

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a document markup language. It is not a programming language
but simply a meta-markup language for text documents. It is an endorsed standard by the W3C and
evolved from SGML as a "lite" version.

XML files contain text with simple readable tags added that describe the data within the document. It is
intended to make complex data structures portable between different computer environments/operating
systems and programming languages. XML can make the actual data file readable instead of having to
have human-readable documents to explain the data files (word processing type documents). The
simplistic language makes it easier to share data due to the quantity of XML parsers available, and XML
acts as the middle layer for many environments. It supports mixed environments, can be used as part of a
protocol for communication or object serialization, data storage, data retrieval and has the ability to define
formats in order to share the data between various applications by sharing DTD's (Document Type
Definitions) and using XSLT (XSL Transformations the ability to convert one XML document into
another).

The XML tags describe the data content, but not the presentation. Applications that need to display an
XML document or file will use either Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) or XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-
FO).

QuickTest currently focuses on the verification of the data content of XML files. XML is not a database
but more of a middle layer to pass data between systems, environments or applications. XML files
typically work in a couple of ways:

One is that data from one system is stored in an XML format to be simply passed to another system

that understands its format and can read/parse it.

A client can send an XML file to a server using a network protocol, then software on the server side

will receive the XML data, parse it and insert it into the database using SQL queries. And vis versa
can occur data can be retrieved from a database based on an SQL query and formatted into XML to
be passed to the client.

Some applications may find it useful to store frequently requested static data in an XML file in order

to eliminate the interfacing with another external application to reduce the network and database time
delays. In this situation the application would be accessing the data from an existing XML data file
directly.