XML Validation on builds

You have probably seen forgotten merge code, a faulty ctrl+s that has stored a s in an xml file, an accidental copy/move of code when scrolling with mouse, which have been found after code pushed to server when something isn’t working correctly. Code is compiled and will give you a compile error, but XML won’t, and a lot of systems today rely heavily on XML configuration

I have the habit of putting the “xml-maven-plugin” plugin to my maven projects which makes XML code to be validated every time it builds, this way I can be sure that nothing has been accidentally added to a file.

<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>xml-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<executions>
  <execution>
    <goals>
      <goal>validate</goal>
    </goals>
  </execution>
</executions>
<configuration>
  <validationSets>
    <validationSet>
      <dir>src/main/resources</dir>
      <includes>
        <include>struts.xml</include>
        <include>register-user-flow-struts.xml</include>
      </includes>
    </validationSet>
    <validationSet>
    <dir>src/main/webapp/WEB-INF</dir>
       <includes>
        <include>applicationContext.xml</include>
        <include>web.xml</include>
        <include>portlet.xml</include>
      </includes>
    </validationSet>
  </validationSets>
</configuration>
</plugin>