Wiremock and XPath attribute testing

Question

Assume I have an XML request containing the following snippet

<foo bar="12356"/>

My service sends this snippet to another services to do things. That service expects a foo node with bar attribute and no text node. The following expression matches that node just fine

//foo[@bar='12356']

The problem is that Wiremock expects a text node to be present in matched foo nodes, as a result, it considers the previous expression to NOT match.

Using wiremock how do you test XML for matching attributes instead of text nodes?

Answer 1

According to XPath spec, namespaces matter. If the xml file was the following

<?xml ...>
<Envelope>
    <foo bar="12356"/>
</Envelope>

Then the XPath expression provided in question would work. But once you add xmlns= declaration, your node is no longer foo but rather "[xmlns]":foo . As a result, //foo only matches unprefixed foo elements.