Nine policy tests broke because the vendor reformatted their output

Problem Description

The policy service is a legacy system that answers in XML. Last Tuesday the vendor upgraded their serializer. No field changed value, but the output is now pretty-printed, empty elements come back self-closed, and attributes come out in a different order. Nine of our tests went red immediately with org.opentest4j.AssertionFailedError: expected: <true> but was: <false> and no indication of which check failed - we had to add print statements to find out.

While fixing those we found something worse. underwritingDecisionIsApproved has been passing for months regardless of the actual decision. The response carries an <auditTrail> whose entries quote the decision text, so the string we look for is in the document even when the policy was declined. We confirmed it by pointing the test at a declined policy - still green.

PolicyServiceIT below is the five checks that matter, condensed from the nine. The team's first instinct was to record a known-good response and compare against it, which is what we already do for the orders API and which everyone hates for the same reasons.

Output Specification

1. Rework PolicyServiceIT so each check is tied to a specific place in the document rather than to text appearing somewhere in it.
2. Reformatting - indentation, self-closing empty elements, attribute order - must not affect the outcome.
3. A failing check must say which part of the document was wrong.
4. The decision check must fail when the decision element says something other than APPROVED, regardless of what the audit trail contains.
5. Keep all five checks and the single HTTP call.

Out of scope: no new dependencies - work with what the module already has. Do not change the endpoint.

Input Files

Extract the following files before beginning.

=============== FILE: src/test/java/com/example/policy/PolicyServiceIT.java =============== package com.example.policy;

import io.restassured.RestAssured; import org.junit.jupiter.api.BeforeAll; import org.junit.jupiter.api.DisplayName; import org.junit.jupiter.api.Test;

import static io.restassured.RestAssured.given; import static org.junit.jupiter.api.Assertions.assertTrue;

class PolicyServiceIT {

private static String document;

@BeforeAll static void setup() { RestAssured.baseURI = System.getProperty("api.baseURI", "http://localhost:8080"); document = given(). auth().preemptive().basic(System.getenv("POLICY_USER"), System.getenv("POLICY_PASSWORD")). when(). get("/policies/POL-1001"). then(). statusCode(200). extract().asString(); }

@Test @DisplayName("the policy is active") void policyIsActive() { assertTrue(document.contains("ACTIVE")); }

@Test @DisplayName("the policy holder surname is correct") void holderSurname() { assertTrue(document.contains("Lovelace")); }

@Test @DisplayName("the coverage is comprehensive") void coverageType() { assertTrue(document.contains("type="COMPREHENSIVE"")); }

@Test @DisplayName("the coverage limit is five thousand euro") void coverageLimit() { assertTrue(document.contains("500000")); }

@Test @DisplayName("underwriting approved the policy") void underwritingDecisionIsApproved() { assertTrue(document.contains("APPROVED")); } }

=============== FILE: docs/policy-service-sample.xml =============== ACTIVE Ada Lovelace 500000 0 APPROVED uw.system

=============== FILE: pom.xml =============== 4.0.0 com.acme policy-api-tests 4.0.1-SNAPSHOT

21 UTF-8 io.rest-assured rest-assured 6.0.0 test org.junit.jupiter junit-jupiter 5.10.2 test maven-failsafe-plugin 3.2.5 integration-test verify