Unit tests for XSLT templates & stylesheets (was RE: n

Mike Kay said:

> It's not a quick fix. It's a serious structural change. Trying to make a
> substantial design change to any program by means of a "quick fix" is
> guaranteed to create an unreliable and unmaintainable mess, and
stylesheets
> are no exception.
>
> (Actually, changing programs I don't understand is something I generally
> prefer to avoid, it almost invariably breaks them.)

Particularly this last comment and my own experiences with maintaining XSLT
makes me wish there was a neat way of writing unit tests for individual
templates and stylsheets as a whole. I would be interested to hear what
other list members experiences or thoughts on unit testing XSLT are.

I use JUnit for unit testing Java code, but I guess I'm initially thinking
along the lines of a guideline which suggests a "unit-test" mode for
stylesheets and XML test-data islands to work on (or references to external
test data documents), but I haven't yet had time to think all the issues
through and perhaps an external framework (i.e. not written in XSLT) is
required.

Regards,
Gareth




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