Experiences UI testing the Uno Platform Android app with Appium

[jamesmcroft]

Quick question, has anyone had any luck running UI tests against an Uno Platform application running on Android using Appium?

I'm currently struggling to get the driver to find any elements in the UI. When I use the layout inspector in Android Studio against the application, I can see the content description containing the automation properties that I'm trying to access.

Knowing how you should access UI elements using the AndroidUIAutomator, I've constructed this quite simple select extension for elements by automation ID but it fails every time.

androidDriver.FindElementByAndroidUIAutomator(new AndroidUiSelector().DescriptionEquals(automationId))

This extension for the framework is based on a similar extension for native UI elements that I created in another UI test library.

Note, I am able to get the application up and running with automation in Appium, the problem is just locating items by the XAML automation ID.

There is a sample UI test project in the Legerity framework that has a simple button click test under Tests/ButtonTests (currently disabled for Android due to this issue).

[jeromelaban]

We have not spent time working with Appium at this point. If you set the same configuration properties as in Uno.UITest documentation, the description field should be filled properly, though.

[jamesmcroft]

This could be the case. What I've been seeing when finding all elements is that some have their content description set where others aren't. Depending on how complex the page is that is.

[jamesmcroft]

After doing an export of what Appium can see, it looks like there are a couple of problems, I believe are caused by Android.

For some controls, the content description isn't being set. However, there are examples like the TextBlock, CheckBox, or Button that set the content description as their content text rather than the automation property.

I'm still having a play around with this and I'll see what I can produce. Thanks for the pointers @jeromelaban

[jeromelaban]

In this case, it's generally caused by the fact that automation "mode" is not enabled properly. For TextBlock, this is done here:

uno/src/Uno.UI/UI/Xaml/Controls/TextBlock/TextBlock.Android.cs

Line 122 in 33543f6

protected sealed override string UIAutomationText => FrameworkElementHelper.IsUiAutomationMappingEnabled ? Name : Text;

You can try setting the FrameworkElementHelper.IsUiAutomationMappingEnabled property explicitly.

[jamesmcroft]

I might have a play with this inside the Uno repository because for some reason it doesn't appear to be working this way with the sample applications I've built with that flag on. This includes if you set the IsUiAutomationMappingEnabled property in the csproj or the FrameworkElementHelper.IsUiAutomationMappingEnabled property in the App.xaml.cs.

[jamesmcroft]

Looks like it works fine in Uno. I believe there might be a bug in Appium.