Testa Appium Driver

Testa appium driver is a wrapper around the ruby_lib_core driver for appium. It leverages all driver features and makes them simple and easy to use.

There are two key concepts in the testa driver

1. Elements are fetched only when needed

It allows you to chain all the selectors and use the adjacent selectors without finding each element in the chain. For example driver.linear_layout.list_view.view_group.button will not execute any find element commands because element command is not given. If click, send_keys or any attribute method is added to the end of chain it will execute find_element before triggering the given element command.

This concept allows you to store the selectors and reuse them later on. For example

# element is not fetched yet
my_fancy_progress_bar = driver.linear_layout.progress_bar

puts my_fancy_progress_bar.text # will fetch the element and print the text (output: "You are on the first page")
driver.button(text: "next page").click # go to the next page that has the same progress bar locator

# will fetch the element again and print the text (output: "You are on the second page")
# without TestaAppiumDriver, a Stale Object Exception would be thronw
puts my_fancy_progress_bar.text 

2. The Best element find / scroll strategy is automatically determined

When given an element locator such as the progress_bar in the first concept, testa appium driver automatically determines the best find element strategy. The only thing to keep in mind is that you cannot mix strategy specific selectors. Strategy specific selectors are from_parent for uiautomator or parent, siblings or children for xpath strategy.

There are also multiple scroll strategies. Android supports both uiautomator and w3c, while iOS only supports w3c scroll strategy. Uiautomator scroll strategy is more fluent and faster but it cannot be limited with single direction element finding, and it does not have sufficient deadzone support.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'testa_appium_driver'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install testa_appium_driver

For the android platform, make sure you are using the latest version of uiautomator server. Versions older than 4.21.2 have breaking issues. To get the latest server version execute:

npm install appium-uiautomator2-server

And apks will be located in ./node_modules/appium-uiautomator2-server/apks. Install both apks on the target device and make sure you have the skipServerInstallation: true capability when starting the driver.

Usage

Initialization

opts = {
    caps: {
        platformName: "Android",
        deviceName: "MyPhone",
        app: "/path/to/your/apk",
        udid: "your_phone_udid",
        automationName: "uiautomator2",
        skipServerInstallation: true, # if uiautomator server is manually installed
        enableMultiWindows: true, # enables appium to see some otherwise "hidden" elements
    }
}
driver = TestaAppiumDriver::Driver.new(opts)

Example 1

driver.linear_layout.button(id: "com.package.name:id/myElementId").click

Looks for the first linear layout and a button within the linear layout that has the provided id. Only 1 find element is executed with the resolved strategy (xpath or uiautomator):
underlying selectors:
xpath: //android.widget.LinearLayout[1]//android.widget.Button[@resource-id="com.package.name:id/myElementId"]
uiautomator: new UiSelector().className("android.widget.LinearLayout").instance(0).childSelector(new UiSelector.className("android.widget.Button").resourceId("com.package.name:id/myElementId")));

Example 2

driver.linear_layout(id: "myShortIdExample").parent.text_view.wait_until_exists(10).text

Testa driver converts shorthand ids(that dont have :id/) to full ids by reading the current package under test and prepending it to the shorthand id. If you don't want to prepend the package name to the id, use = sign before the id, for example id: "=idWithoutAPackageName".

After adding the parent and text_view selectors and before retrieving the text value wait_until_exists(10) is used to wait up to 10 seconds for the element to appear in the page before exception is thrown.

underlying selectors:
xpath: //android.widget.LinearLayout[@resource-id="com.package.name:id/myShortIdExample"][1]/../android.widget.TextView[1]
uiautomator: exception: parent selector cannot be used with uiautomator strategy

Example 3

driver.list_view(top: 200).edit_text(text: "Looking for this text").scroll_to.align!(:bottom).enabled?

If the element cannot be found in the current view, scroll_to action will scroll to start of the scrollable container, and start scrolling to the end until the element is found or end is reached. Once found the align!(:bottom) command will align the element to the bottom of the scrollable container. Finally, once the element is scrolled into view and aligned, it will check if the edit_text is enabled.

The scrollable container is resolved by looking the chain of selectors. Selector can be a scrollable container if scrollable: true or is one of the scrollable classes:

• android.widget.ListView
• android.widget.ScrollView
• android.widget.HorizontalScrollView
• androidx.recyclerview.widget.RecyclerView
• XCUIElementTypeScrollView

If the selector chain does not contain a scrollable container, a driver.scrollabe command will be executed to retrieve the first scrollable element in page.

Scrollable selectors can accept the top, right, bottom and left parameters as deadzone to prevent that edge of the container be used as scrollable surface. Custom views can also be used as scrollable containers with as_scrollable command. The command marks the last selector as scrollable container. driver.view(id: "myCustomScrollableView").as_scrollable(top: 200).page_down

Example 4

driver.buttons.scroll_each do |element|
  puts element.text
end

The scroll_each method is one of the scrollable actions. It will start from the beginning of the scrollable container, in this case driver.scrollable, and find every button in the screen. It will scroll the page until the end of scrollable container is reached and all buttons are found.

Example 5 (Invalid combination)

driver.frame_layout.from_parent.button(text: "My Cool text").siblings

This example demonstrates a invalid selector because it cannot be resolved with xpath nor uiautomator strategy. It will raise StrategyMixException because from_parent selector can only be used with uiautomator strategy and siblings selector can only be used with xpath strategy.

Methods

Android

Class Selectors

• element
• elements
• scrollable
• scrollables
• image_view
• image_views
• frame_layout
• frame_layouts
• linear_layout
• linear_layouts
• view
• views
• edit_text
• edit_texts
• view_group
• view_groups
• relative_layout
• relative_layouts
• recycler_view
• recycler_views
• button
• buttons
• image_button
• image_buttons
• horizontal_scroll_view
• horizontal_scroll_views
• scroll_view
• scroll_views
• view_pager
• view_pagers
• check_box
• check_boxes
• list_view
• list_views
• progress_bar
• progress_bars
• radio_button
• radio_buttons
• radio_group
• radio_groups
• search_view
• search_views
• spinner
• spinners
• switch
• switches
• toast
• toasts
• toolbar
• toolbars
• text_view
• text_views
• web_view
• web_views
• card_view
• card_views

Adjacent selectors

• from_parent
• parent
• child
• children
• siblings
• preceding_sibling
• preceding_siblings
• following_sibling
• following_siblings

Element Selector arguments

• id

• long_clickable

• desc

• class

• text

• package

• checkable

• checked

• clickable

• enabled

• focusable

• focused

• index

• selected

• scrollable

• image

• imageMatchThreshold (option for image selector)

• fixImageFindScreenshotDims (option for image selector)

• fixImageTemplateSize (option for image selector)

• fixImageTemplateScale (option for image selector)

• defaultImageTemplateScale (option for image selector)

• checkForImageElementStaleness (option for image selector)

• autoUpdateImageElementPosition (option for image selector)

• imageElementTapStrategy (option for image selector)

• getMatchedImageResult (option for image selector)

Attributes

• text
• package
• class_name
• checkable?
• checked?
• clickable?
• desc
• enabled?
• focusable?
• focused?
• long_clickable?
• password?
• id
• scrollable?
• selected?
• displayed?
• selection_start
• selection_end
• bounds
• index

iOS

Type Selectors

• element
• elements
• window
• windows
• other
• others
• navigation_bar
• navigation_bars
• button
• buttons
• image
• images
• static_text
• static_texts
• scrollable
• scrollables
• scroll_view
• scroll_views
• table
• tables
• cell
• cells

Adjacent selectors

• parent
• child
• children
• siblings
• preceding_sibling
• preceding_siblings
• following_sibling
• following_siblings

Element Selector arguments

• name, id

• enabled

• type, class

• label

• width

• height

• visible

• value

• image

• imageMatchThreshold (option for image selector)

• fixImageFindScreenshotDims (option for image selector)

• fixImageTemplateSize (option for image selector)

• fixImageTemplateScale (option for image selector)

• defaultImageTemplateScale (option for image selector)

• checkForImageElementStaleness (option for image selector)

• autoUpdateImageElementPosition (option for image selector)

• imageElementTapStrategy (option for image selector)

• getMatchedImageResult (option for image selector)

Attributes

• accessibility_container
• accessible?
• class_name
• enabled?
• frame
• index
• label, text
• name
• rect, bounds
• selected?
• type
• value
• visible?

Scroll actions

• scroll_each
• scroll_each_down
• scroll_each_up
• scroll_each_left
• scroll_each_right
• align! (if does not exist, will scroll to find)
• align_top! (if does not exist, will scroll to find)
• align_bottom! (if does not exist, will scroll to find)
• align_left! (if does not exist, will scroll to find)
• align_right! (if does not exist, will scroll to find)
• align
• align_top
• align_bottom
• align_left
• align_right
• scroll_to
• scroll_down_to
• scroll_up_to
• scroll_right_to
• scroll_left_to
• scroll_to_start
• scroll_to_end
• page_down
• page_up
• page_left
• page_right
• fling_down
• fling_up
• fling_left
• fling_right
• drag_to
• drag_by

Helpers

• as_scrollable
• wait_until_exists
• wait_while_exists
• wait_until
• wait_while
• when_exists
• exists?
• long_tap

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.