XmlUnit

XmlUnit is an insanely great tool. It has saved me a ton of time in the past few weeks.

I log the differences from my unit test like this :

        XMLUnit.setIgnoreWhitespace(true);
      Diff xmlDiff = new Diff(expectedXml, result);

      DetailedDiff myDiff = new DetailedDiff(xmlDiff);
      List<Difference> allDifferences = myDiff.getAllDifferences();
      for(Difference d : allDifferences){
          log.debug("difference : " + d);
      }

The "result" string comes from a Groovy class using XmlSlurper. Also I usually generate "expectedXml" from a Groovy class.