An XML file is a structured file that contains information you provide in a manner of tree. Of course, it is good to have a look a more formal and more complete definition from Wikipedia. Here is the quote from Wikipedia;
“Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium’s XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications — all of them free open standards — define XML.
The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability across the Internet. It is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for different human languages. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, the language is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures such as those used in web services.”
If you want to learn more and in depth about XML, I suggest you to look at this Wikipedia page.
Also note that if you haven’t read the previous section about how to prepare a test data set in Excel, you can click on this link and read it first.
Let’s finish this definition part with a simple example from w3schools. Also, here is the link as a reference.
<note> <to>Tove</to> <from>Jani</from> <heading>Reminder</heading> <body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body></note>
As you can see in the above example that there is a “note” object and there are features of it. These features are indented so that we can understand they are the features. For example, there is a “to” feature which contains “Tove” value and other features also have their own values.
How Do We Use an XML File in Data Validation?
XML files are the second step in our data validation process. The first step was Excel and we created or copied the data we want to work on. After it, the third step will be an XSD file to check the XML file we created.
Usage of an XML file in data validation is just having the data from Excel. In order to do that we need to export our data from Excel to an XML file. We will do that in next sections. Our XML file will contain all the data from our Excel file and then we are ready to go to.
Note: You can also check this blog post and some other interesting topics on my personal web page.
