Validator API

The Validator offers an API which allows you to integrate Validator in your own applications.

Dependency Management

Currently, we do not deploy to Maven Central or similar. Hence you need to build and optionally deploy the Validator artifacts to your own shared (or local) repository (see for example Maven Documentation).

Maven

Then you can declare the dependency as follows:

<dependency>
   <groupId>de.kosit</groupId>
   <artifactId>validationtool</artifactId>
   <version>${validator.version}</version>
</dependency>

Gradle

dependencies {
    compile group: 'de.kosit', name: 'validationtool', version: '1.1.0'
}

Usage

Prerequisite for use is a valid scenario definition and the a folder with all necessary artifacts for validation (repository) either on the filesystem or on the classpath.

The following example demonstrates loading scenario.xml and whole configuration from classpath and validating one XML document:

package org.kosit.validator.example;

import java.net.URISyntaxException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.nio.file.Path;
import java.nio.file.Paths;

import de.kosit.validationtool.api.Check;
import de.kosit.validationtool.api.CheckConfiguration;
import de.kosit.validationtool.api.Input;
import de.kosit.validationtool.api.InputFactory;
import de.kosit.validationtool.api.Result;
import de.kosit.validationtool.impl.DefaultCheck;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;

public class StandardExample {

    public void run(Path testDocument) throws URISyntaxException {
        // Load scenarios.xml from classpath
        URL scenarios = this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResource("scenarios.xml");
        // Load the rest of the specific Validator configuration from classpath
        CheckConfiguration config = new CheckConfiguration(scenarios.toURI());
        // Use the default validation procedure
        Check validator = new DefaultCheck(config);
        // Validate a single document
        Input document = InputFactory.read(testDocument);
        // Get Result including information about the whole validation
        Result report = validator.checkInput(document);
        System.out.println("Is processing succesful=" + report.isProcessingSuccessful());
        // Get report document if processing was successful
        Document result = null;
        if (report.isProcessingSuccessful()) {
            result = report.getReportDocument();
        }
        // continue processing results...
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        // Path of document for validation
        Path testDoc = Paths.get(args[0]);
        StandardExample example = new StandardExample();
        // run example validation
        example.run(testDoc);

    }
}

The Result interface has convenience methods to retrieve details about XSD validation errors and Schematron messages and other processing results. See Result.java for details.

Initializing all XML artifacts and XSLT-executables is expensive. The Check instance is threadsafe and keeps all artifacts. Therefore, we recommend the re-use of an Check instance.

The only input de.kosit.validationtool.api.Input which can be created by various methods of de.kosit.validationtool.api.InputFactory. The InputFactory calculates a hash sum for each Input which is also written to the Report. SHA-256 from the JDK is the default algorithm. It can be changed using the read-methods of InputFactory.

The main interface Check.java allows using a batch interface (processing list of Inputs). However, there is no parallel processing implemented at the moment.

Accept Recommendation and Accept Match

A tri-state Object AcceptRecommendation can be retrieved from the Result using getAcceptRecommendation().

The three defined states are:

ACCEPTABLE i.e. the recommendation is to accept input based on the evaluation of the overall validation.
REJECT i.e. the recommendation is to reject input based on the evaluation of the overall validation.
UNDEFINED i.e. the evaluation of the overall validation could not be computed (overall processing is incomplete)

The accept recommendation is based on either:

schema and schematron validation result
if configured based on acceptMatch configuration of the scenario (see below)

Accept Match in Scenario Configuration

For your own configuration you can add an acceptMatch element in each scenario. It can contain in XPATH expression over your own defined Report to compute a boolean. An XPATH expression evaluating to true will lead to an ACCEPTABLE and otherwise to a REJECT recommendation.

This allows to have control over what validation result is to be considered acceptable for your own application context. E.g. you can overrule schematron validation errors with acceptMatch configuration and consider certain errors as acceptable. Nevertheless you can not overrule schema errors with accept match.

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