Change the request and response validation to use paths mapped to matchers

[uglyog]

Change the request and response validation to use paths mapped to matchers

[bethesque]

Not sold on this idea, I think it would be even more awkward to specify matcher for every value than to specify a large hash. Imagine

$person.address.street => "...",
$person.address.suburb => "...",
$person.address.postcode => "...",
$person.address.state => "...",
$person.address.country => "...",

vs

{ "person" : 
{ "address" : {
  "street: "...',
  "suburb: "...',
  "postcode": "...',
  "state": "...',
  "country": "...'  }
}

This is a simple example, but imagine some deeply nested hashes - you'd have to repeat the full path to each node for each value, which would end up much more typing than just specifying a hash. Using a hash, you also get the benefit of human readable documentation - the JSON is much more communicative than json paths, in my opinion.

Maybe I've misunderstood what you mean though?

[uglyog]

We want the comparison to be composable. So for your example, we would do something like:

"/organisation/person" =>  {
    "address" : {
        "street: "...',
        "suburb: "...',
        "postcode": "...',
        "state": "...',
        "country": "...'  }
    }
},
"//product" => {
    ...
}

That may we're only validating the subset of the document we're interested in. For JSON it may not make much sense, but when you have a SOAP based service, you want to skip all the SOAP junk.

[bethesque]

You make a good point about the SOAP. Paths do make more sense for XML.

Generating the mock response would be a bit trickier though - would we put a product node in the top level of the response in your example above?

[uglyog]

No, the // means anywhere in the document.

The response for the client would have to be generated somehow. Maybe in a similar way to the Pact Terms.

Maybe we should look at how Brent is thinking of doing it in his project because he wants to do something similar.

[bethesque]

Yeah, I get the double slash - we'd have to pick an arbitrary place to put the hash in in the response though, which would be tricky. Deterministic/random? Good idea about talking to Brent.

[jagregory]

We should also bare in mind all the XML junk around namespaces and attributes. Do we validate using a query that contains that complexity (//v123:order[@type='online']) or by some simple query with a chunk of XML as a value? The more complex the query, the harder it would be to do any automagic generation of a response.

[YOU54F]

Closing this as matching based on the 2.0 spec has been implemented

https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-specification/tree/version-2?tab=readme-ov-file#supported-matchers