This is a continuation of our previous articles on Appium element inspection, where we covered the basics of UI Automator Viewer and learned how you can use it to inspect elements in your mobile app. There are few more points that we will cover in this article. It’s mostly related to an additional functionality of UIAutomatorViewer, and then some of the current limitations of UI Automator Viewer (or Android automation in general).
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Path of UI Automator viewer From UI Automator only you will come to know about activity name and package name which will be used in code D: appium android-sdkr24.0.2-windows android-sdk-windows tools. Now started with the code. If you want to work with and browser. @Parameters(“browser”) @Test(priority=1). UIAutomatorViewer comes as a part of the Android SDK manager and it is a UI inspector GUI (graphical user interface) tool that helps us to inspect UI elements of an Android application. Inspecting of an application is important as we need locators like resource IDs, class, text of an Android application component to automate the application. UIAutomatorViewer comes as a part of the Android SDK manager and it is a UI inspector GUI (graphical user interface) tool that helps us to inspect UI elements of an Android application. Inspecting of an application is important as we need locators like resource IDs, class, text of an Android application component to automate the application.
Let’s jump over to the first section.
Save UI Automator Viewer Screenshot and Object Hierarchy Dump
You can actually save the Screenshot and XML dump (containing information of all elements) of the screen that you are currently inspecting. This is helpful especially when you are working with multiple screens on your app. In such a scenario, one option is to inspect each of the screens every time you want to use it. This would be cumbersome especially when you have to return to a previous screen multiple times.
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Also, this approach always keeps your phone hooked on to the USB. This can be annoying if you have a USB cable with short length. So a good alternative would be to just save the screenshot and XML for each screen beforehand. Once you get all the screenshots, you can just use UIAutomatorViewer to open the previous screens from your system, rather than inspecting it every time.
Let’s see the steps that you can follow to save your screenshots and object hierarchy files.
1. Connect your mobile device to computer using USB. Open Google Play Store app on your phone
2. Now open UIAutomatorViewer and click on Inspect button to load the entire screen
3. Click on Save icon. It will ask for the location, where the screenshot has to be saved
4. Select any folder and click on OK to save it (we are saving it in a folder called – UI Automator Viewer Screenshots)
5. The screenshot and object hierarchy dump will be saved in the folder you selected. Open the folder and check that there are 2 files stored there. One is the screenshot, which is a .png file. Other one, a .uix file, is the object hierarchy dump.
6. This way you can inspect all the screens initially and then save it on your machine.
Open saved screenshot and UI dump
Opening the screenshot and object hierarchy dump in UIAutomatorViewer is pretty straightforward –
1. Click on folder icon from UI Automator Viewer window menu. It will display Open UI Dump Files popup as shown below
2. Click on the Browse button for Screenshot section, navigate to the folder where you saved the screenshot and select the screenshot
3. Do the same for UI XML dump as well. Once you select both the files, then the OK button would get enabled
4. Click on OK button. The screenshot and its UI dump would be displayed in UI Automator Viewer window.
Try using this approach a few times, especially when you are frequently navigating back and forth on the screens of your app. You will soon realize that this is a very good approach to follow.
Current limitations with Mobile Automation
In this section, you will learn about some of the limitations that you would face with mobile automation. Some of these are specific to Android automation, and few are generic which would apply to both Android and iOS.
1. One of the major limitations right now is that you can’t verify the look and feel of the elements on your mobile app. For example, you can’t check the color, font type, font size etc of texts, buttons and other elements in your mobile app. Text alignment, whether the text is bold or italic cannot be checked using Appium. But you can verify these HTML and CSS related things with Selenium on web browsers.
This is not a shortcoming of Appium. Its just that the underlying Android/iOS frameworks don’t expose these properties to be used by Appium. With UI Automator Viewer, you will see that Android doesn’t provide any property for you to verify the element’s UI.
2. Another limitation is the lack of a good method to identify XPaths. For web automation, you have tools like Firebug, which help you identify the Xpath. But UI Automator Viewer doesn’t provide this facility.
Please Note:Appium Desktop provides a way using which you can identify XPaths. But that is also a pretty basic way. With Appium, you would mostly have to figure out the Xpaths on your own.
3. Now this one is Android specific. With Android, you can only work with the objects that are currently visible on the screen. UI Automator Viewer would not show you the elements which are not currently displayed on the screen. Let us check out an example to understand this.
Have a look at Recommended for You section from the above image. Currently it shows 3 items fully and the 4th item is partially visible. But you would be able to scroll left and right on this section to view more items. However, when you inspect this screen, UI Automator Viewer will show you only 4 items in this section.
Now consider a scenario, where you have to write a script which prints the names of all the items in this section. Since Android returns only what is visible on the screen, you will have to write a loop with the logic given below –
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- Fetch the list of all the items from the Recommended for You section
- Scroll horizontally so that next set of items is displayed
- Fetch the new list of items
- Scroll horizontally again, and keep on fetching new items till no new items are displayed
With this kind of logic, your code will get bit complex. But as we said, this is a limitation only with Android. If you use Appium with iOS, you will not face this issue. This is because iOS would return the entire list of items on the screen. Suppose if there are 20 items in Recommended for You section, iOS will return the list of all the elements, even though only 3-4 of them are actually visible on the screen.
This was all about some of the current limitations with mobile automation. Do you know about any other shortcoming? Let us know about it using the comments section.
With this we complete our 3 part article series on UI Automator Viewer. We still have couple of more articles where we will cover the process of element identification using Appium Desktop tool itself. Bookmark our Appium Tutorial link, where we will provide links to all these upcoming articles.
In this document
- uiautomator API
The uiautomator testing framework lets you test your user interface (UI) efficiently by creating automated functional UI testcases that can be run against your app on one or more devices.
For more information on testing with the uiautomator framework, see UI Testing.
Syntax
To run your testcases on the target device, you can use the adb shell command to invoke the uiautomator tool. The syntax is:
Here’s an example:
Command-line Options
The following table describes the subcommands and options for uiautomator.
Table 1. Command-line options for uiautomator
| Subcommand | Option | Description |
|---|---|---|
runtest | <JARS> | Required. The <JARS> argument is the name of one or more JAR files that you deployed to the target device which contain your uiautomator testcases. You can list more than one JAR file by using a space as a separator. |
-c <CLASSES> | Required (API 17 or lower).The <CLASSES> argument is a list of test classes or test methods in <JARS> to run. Each class or method must be fully qualified with the package name, in one of these formats:
Note:This argument is not required for API 18 and higher. If not specified, all test cases in | |
--nohup | Runs the test to completion on the device even if its parent process is terminated (for example, if the device is disconnected). | |
-e <NAME> <VALUE> | Specify other name-value pairs to be passed to test classes. May be repeated. Note: The | |
-e debug [true|false] | Wait for debugger to connect before starting. | |
dump [file] | Generate an XML file with a dump of the current UI hierarchy. If a filepath is not specified, by default, the generated dump file is stored on the device in this location /storage/sdcard0/window_dump.xml. | |
-e outputFormat simple | -s | Enables less verbose JUnit style output. | |
events | Prints out accessibility events to the console until the connection to the device is terminated |
uiautomator API
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The uiautomator API is bundled in the uiautomator.jar file under the <android-sdk>/platforms/ directory. The API includes these key classes, interfaces, and exceptions that allow you to capture and manipulate UI components on the target app:
Classes
| Class | Description |
|---|---|
com.android.uiautomator.core.UiCollection | Used to enumerate a container's user interface (UI) elements for the purpose of counting, or targeting a sub elements by a child's text or description. |
com.android.uiautomator.core.UiDevice | Provides access to state information about the device. You can also use this class to simulate user actions on the device, such as pressing the d-pad hardware button or pressing the Home and Menu buttons. |
com.android.uiautomator.core.UiObject | Represents a user interface (UI) element. |
com.android.uiautomator.core.UiScrollable | Provides support for searching for items in a scrollable UI container. |
com.android.uiautomator.core.UiSelector | Represents a query for one or more target UI elements on a device screen. |
com.android.uiautomator.core.Configurator | Allows you to set key parameters for running uiautomator tests. |
Interfaces
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| Interface | Description |
|---|---|
com.android.uiautomator.core.UiWatcher | Represents a conditional watcher on the target device. |
com.android.uiautomator.testrunner.IAutomationSupport | Provides auxiliary support for running test cases. |
com.android.uiautomator.testrunner.UiAutomatorTestCase | Defines an environment for running multiple tests. All uiautomator test cases should extend this class. |
Exceptions
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| Exception | Description |
|---|---|
com.android.uiautomator.core.UiObjectNotFoundException | Indicates when a a UiSelector could not be matched to any UI element displayed. |