Orderless Data

Although the XML standard states that the order of elements is significant, in some situations you may have data where the order is not important, and you do not want changes to order to be shown. DeltaXML allows you to indicate for any element that its children are orderless, i.e. you do not want changes to order to be shown.

Consider the example shown below. Initially, changes are shown due to the different order of the elements.

• click ORIGINAL, ORDERED to return to the original example which is compared as ordered elements.
• click MAKE ORDERLESS to add an attribute to indicate that the order is not significant. The changes to the order are now ignored, and no changes are reported.

You can mix ordered and orderless elements in a single document. The deltaxml:ordered="false" attribute applies just to the immediate child elements of that element and not to all its descendants. Note these examples use the full context delta.

DeltaXML Input and Output