UI Automation App Input

So, I’ve been doing more UI Automation test work, and I’ve discovered a couple of things. I’m kind of trying to write them up as I run into them, although I’m putting together a helper library that I’ll announce at some point, hopefully soon.

So, what I’m trying to work on is a race condition in my KidChart app. The issue (I think) has to do with notifications during input into an UISearchBar.

So, I got to the right screen (more on that later), and tried searchBar.setValue(“Ate 2 Vegetables!”), but it turns out that if you run “.setValue()”, none of the delegate events fire, so I had to use the Keyboard.

I didn’t expect using the keyboard to be nearly as hard as it turned out to be. I can’t figure out an intuitive way to change keyboard modes (I expected there to be a key called something like “Shift” that you could hit to get capital letters. No such luck), so I ended up having to do it the hard way. This is what I ended up with to type in the string in setValue() above:

1var searchbar = view .searchBars()[0]; 2searchbar .tap(); 3 4if (searchbar .hasKeyboardFocus()) { 5 UIATarget .localTarget().delay(1); 6 7 UIATarget .localTarget().tap({x :20,y :400}); //Hit Shift for Capital Letters 8 UIATarget .localTarget().delay(1); 9 10 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“A”).tap(); 11 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“t”).tap(); 12 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“e”).tap(); 13 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“space”). 14
tap(); 15 UIATarget .localTarget().tap({x :20,y :460}); //Select Number Keyboard 16 UIATarget .localTarget().delay(1); 17 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“2”).tap(); 18 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“space”). 19
tap(); 20 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“v”).tap(); 21 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“e”).tap(); 22 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“g”).tap(); 23 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“e”).tap(); 24 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“t”).tap(); 25 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“a”).tap(); 26 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“b”).tap(); 27 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“l”).tap(); 28 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“e”).tap(); 29 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName(“s”).tap(); 30

31 UIATarget .localTarget().tap({x :20,y :460}); //Select Number Keyboard 32 UIATarget .localTarget().delay(1); 33

34 UIATarget .localTarget().tap({x :20,y :400}); //Now Select Symbol Keyboard 35 UIATarget .localTarget().delay(1); 36 37 UIATarget .localTarget().frontMostApp().keyboard().keys().firstWithName("!").tap(); 38 39} else { 40 UIALogger .logFail(“Could not activate the Search Bar”); 41}

That’s all going into a library - so my tests won’t actually look like that, but I needed to do it by hand once to figure out what to put in the library. And I figured it was the best thing to throw into the blog here to illustrate the technique - so you don’t have to figure it out for yourselves (and I don’t have to figure it out again).

Happy Testing.