Question

I have an error message returned for which I want to use xpath assertion to confirm. The problem is the Transaction Id changes (system generated) while the rest of the information in iongt:faultstring remains constant.

Is there a simple way of doing this assertion?

<iongt:retrieveSystemInformationFault xmlns:iongt="http://www.testing.com/xml/TestingIONGT">
      <iongt:faultcode>TestError012</iongt:faultcode>
      <iongt:faultstring>Transaction Id: 8781991797:
Testing error message here</iongt:faultstring>
    </iongt:retrieveCustomerInformationFault>

Using an ‘*’ does not work:

<iongt:retrieveSystemInformationFault xmlns:iongt="http://www.testing.com/xml/TestingIONGT">
      <iongt:faultcode>TestError012</iongt:faultcode>
      <iongt:faultstring>Transaction Id: *:
Testing error message here</iongt:faultstring>
    </iongt:retrieveCustomerInformationFault>

Answer 1

I suspect that SoapUI XPath Match Expected Result wildcards have to match entire text nodes, not part of one.

Of course, you could just assert at a less precise level, by using an asterisk for the whole text content in your Expected Result (as you mentioned this works):

<iongt:faultstring>*</iongt:faultstring>

But if you need to be more precise, you could also modify your XPath expression as follows. Instead of just

//iongt:retrieveSystemInformationFault

for example, you could have this XPath Expression:

//iongt:retrieveSystemInformationFault/iongt:faultcode

with an Expected Result of

<iongt:faultcode xmlns:iongt="http://www.testing.com/xml/TestingIONGT">TestError012</iongt:faultcode>

and another assertion with XPath expression

//iongt:retrieveSystemInformationFault/iongt:faultstring[starts-with(., 'Transaction Id: ') and
   contains(., 'Testing error message here')]

I’m suggesting contains() here because XPath 1.0 doesn’t have ends-with(). If you really need to get precise, instead of just contains(), you could substitute an equivalent for ends-with() using string-length() and substring(), but I doubt that level of effort is necessary.

The expected result for the above would be just

<iongt:faultstring xmlns:iongt="http://www.testing.com/xml/TestingIONGT">*</iongt:faultstring>

Or you could combine the two into one assert … let me know if you want to see an example of that.