When it comes to mobile automated testing, one of the most crucial aspects is identifying UI elements correctly. Without effective element identification, your test scripts will stumble, leading to flaky tests and wasted time. This is where Appium Inspector comes into play.

What is Appium Inspector?

Appium Inspector is a powerful tool that allows testers to inspect and interact with app UIs. It gives insights into the structure of mobile applications by displaying the hierarchy of UI elements, their properties, and their attributes. This visibility allows testers to write more effective and reliable automation scripts.

Setting Up Appium Inspector

Before you begin using Appium Inspector, ensure you have the following prerequisites in place:

1. Install Appium: Download and install Appium on your machine. You can get the Appium desktop application which contains Appium Inspector.
2. Set Up Your Mobile Device: Make sure your mobile device or emulator is configured properly for testing.
3. Configure Desired Capabilities: Set up the desired capabilities in Appium, which include platform name, device name, app package, and app activity, among others.

Launching Appium Inspector

1. Open the Appium Desktop application you installed.
2. Start the Appium server by clicking the Start Server button.
3. Click on the Start New Session to configure connections to your app.
4. Fill in the desired capabilities, such as:

   {
       "platformName": "Android",
       "deviceName": "emulator-5554",
       "app": "/path/to/your/app.apk",
       "automationName": "UiAutomator2"
   }

5. Click on the Start Session button to launch your application in an inspector session.

Inspecting Elements

Once your application is running, the Appium Inspector will display it on the screen with an overlay showing its element hierarchy.

• Select an Element: Hover over the elements displayed on the screen; as you do so, you’ll see the corresponding XML structure on the right side. Click on any element to inspect it further.

• View Properties: Once an element is selected, you can see its attributes like:

  • resource-id
  • text
  • class
  • package

  Having this information is crucial for writing your test scripts, as you’ll be using these attributes to interact with the elements.

Example: Identifying a Button Element

Let’s say we want to identify a button in our application using Appium Inspector.

1. Start the inspector and navigate to the screen where the button is located.
2. Click on the button using the inspector. The properties will appear on the right.
3. You might see something like this:
   • resource-id: com.example.app:id/login_button
   • text: Login
   • class: android.widget.Button

To click this button in your automation script, you can use any of the following selectors:

• Using resource-id:

  driver.findElement(By.id("com.example.app:id/login_button")).click();

• Using text:

  driver.findElement(By.xpath("//android.widget.Button[@text='Login']")).click();

• Using class with resource-id:

  driver.findElement(By.xpath("//android.widget.Button[@resource-id='com.example.app:id/login_button']")).click();

Adding Assertions

After performing interactions, it is essential to add assertions to ensure elements behave as expected. For instance, you may want to check if the app navigates to the next screen after clicking the button.

WebElement nextScreenElement = driver.findElement(By.id("com.example.app:id/welcome_text"));
Assert.assertTrue(nextScreenElement.isDisplayed());

In summary, exploring and interacting with Appium Inspector will significantly improve your testing efficiency. With the ability to accurately identify elements and their properties, you can create stable and reliable automated tests for your mobile applications.