Design and Implementation of a Generic Interface Comparison Tool for Complex Message Structures

In fast‑iteration internet development, regression testing often lags behind code changes, especially for large, complex messages such as airline ticket engine payloads. Traditional API automation—pre‑written test cases executed manually or via Jenkins—fails to provide comprehensive coverage for these intricate structures.

To address this, the author proposes a generic interface comparison tool that reduces cost and improves efficiency. The tool introduces a business‑logic key concept, where a combination of one or more attributes uniquely identifies an element within an unordered array, enabling reliable one‑to‑one mapping even when elements are not ordered.

For highly repetitive data, an Agg structure is used: repeated nodes are extracted into a separate array with unique identifiers, similar to relational database normalization, dramatically shrinking payload size. However, these identifiers lack business meaning, so the tool employs a reference mechanism to compute business‑logic keys before comparison, ensuring meaningful validation.

The tool’s features include:

Interface management: configure request/response contracts, test case templates, business‑logic key settings, and reference configurations for Agg messages.

Test suite management: create suites per interface, exclude irrelevant nodes, execute tests concurrently, and display comparison results for analysis.

Comparison flow: configure business rules, apply a universal comparison algorithm that recursively matches nodes based on the derived keys, and lower the testing barrier for complex interfaces.

Overall, the solution provides a configurable, reusable, and maintainable approach to automate regression testing of complex API messages.