How to find a loactor with Mobilewright?

[itkhanz]

Hi,
I have been looking into Mobilewright documentation and trying to find a guide on how to identify locators to be used for finding elements. I did not find any documentation that explains the locator discovery mechanism. Writing Tests docs only state how to use locator methods, but not how do you find these locatrs in first place?
https://mobilewright.dev/docs/getting-started/writing-tests#finding-elements

Does Mobilewright also support use of XPath or iOS native strategies like predicate string, and class chain?
https://appium.github.io/appium-xcuitest-driver/latest/reference/locator-strategies/

Appium provides a handy GUI tool, Appium Inspector which is used for finding selectors from the accessibility tree, to see the attributes of element, and execute commands. Does Mobilewright propose a similiar approach of using Appium Inspector or offers an alternative solution for finding selectors and attributes of screen elements?

Thank you.

[gmegidish]

Hey @itkhanz . I want to see if we can escape the XPath and Predicates. The reason is, they're not re-usable in another context. You won't be able to re-use tests written for Android to run on iOS. As of now, it's possible. So we'll see how that goes.

We will ship a "mobilewright codegen" feature in the future, which will let you inspect elements on the screen and get the possible locators for them. It's coming up after Webview and Flutter support.

Should I ping you when this feature is in production?

Also, you may call console.dir(await screen.viewTree()) right now to dump the view tree to stdout, maybe that's good enough for you for now to find the locators you want.

[itkhanz]

If there is no XPath or Predicate feature, then is there already or maybe in future do you plan to support locator chaining for example I want to target an element with ID toolbarTitle which should be inside another element with ID charging_no_auth_toolbar, this is how it is possible with Appium PageFactory:-

@AndroidFindBys(value = {
    @AndroidBy(id = "SelectChargePointEnabledToolbar"),
    @AndroidBy(className = "android.widget.TextView")
 })

so wondering how can a similar objective be achieved with MobileWright if we want to target a particular element inside another element either/both of which may not have an ID or use different selector strategy?

Also what if both Android and iOS have different IDs for same on screen element, is there a convinient way to specify platform specific locator without necessarily declaring a new variable? For context, Appium supports it as:-

@iOSXCUITFindBy(accessibility = "ChargePointTitle")
@AndroidFindBy(id = "EvseIdLabelNonHighlightedPart")
public WebElement evseIdNonHighlighted;

[cozyloon]

console.dir(await screen.viewTree()) is not working for me. Any other solutions?

[gmegidish]

Hey! You're not getting any data back from viewTree? Can you help us debug this? Platform, how to reproduce?

Lately we received a bug report that Android apps with endless animations cause issues with view trees. We'll solve it. Right now the workaround is to disable animations via adb shell.

[cozyloon]

@gmegidish, here I'll provide a git repo for my code sample

https://github.com/cozyloon/Mobilewright-Android-Automation

Created Pixel 6 emulator

avdmanager create avd --name "Pixel" --package "system-images;android-34;google_apis_playstore;x86_64" --device "pixel_6"

start emulator

emulator -avd Pixel

and run the cloned sample project. including the console.dir(await screen.viewTree()); in example.spec.js file.

ERROR

RpcError: failed to get foreground app on device Pixel: could not determine foreground app
at RpcClient.handleMessage (D:\mobilewright\node_modules@mobilewright\driver-mobilecli\src\rpc-client.ts:175:22)
at WebSocket. (D:\mobilewright\node_modules@mobilewright\driver-mobilecli\src\rpc-client.ts:82:14)
at Receiver.receiverOnMessage (D:\mobilewright\node_modules\ws\lib\websocket.js:1225:20)
at Receiver.dataMessage (D:\mobilewright\node_modules\ws\lib\receiver.js:596:14)
at Receiver.getData (D:\mobilewright\node_modules\ws\lib\receiver.js:496:10)
at Receiver.startLoop (D:\mobilewright\node_modules\ws\lib\receiver.js:167:16)
at Receiver._write (D:\mobilewright\node_modules\ws\lib\receiver.js:94:10)
at Socket.socketOnData (D:\mobilewright\node_modules\ws\lib\websocket.js:1360:35)