Sometimes you require to, but don & # x27; t want to automatise any app in especial, or desire to start from the homescreen as part of a multi-app flow, or only desire to automate a set of built-in apps the way a exploiter would near things. In this case, it & # x27; s really possible to commence an Appium iOS sessionwithouta specific app.

To do this we make use of the concept of the iOSSpringboard, which is essentially another word for the home blind. The Springboard is essentially an app, though it & # x27; s one that can & # x27; t be terminated. As an & quot; app & quot;, it has its own bundle ID: com.apple.springboard! So, we can actually use this to start an Appium session without referring to any & quot; existent & quot; app in peculiar:

capabilities.setCapability (`` app '', `` com.apple.springboard '');

Check out:

On its own, nevertheless, this isn & # x27; t depart to work, because Appium will try to establish this app, and deeply in the XCUITest code related to app launching is some logic that makes sure the app is terminated before launching. As I mentioned earlier, the Springboard can & # x27; t be end, so trying to commence an Appium session this way will lead to a hanging server. What we can do is include another capacity, autoLaunch, and set it to false, which tells Appium not to nark with initializing and launching the app, but just to start a session and give you back control straightaway:

capabilities.setCapability (`` autoLaunch '', mistaken);
SUSA automates exploratory testing with persona-driven behavior, catching bugs that scripted automation misses.

Also assay:

At this point, starting an Appium session in this way will drop you at the Springboard. It won & # x27; t necessarily drop you at any specialpageof the Springboard, still. If you & # x27; re an iOS user, you & # x27; ll cognize that the & quot; home screen & quot; is really a unharmed set of screens, depending on how many apps you receive and how you & # x27; ve organized them. One of the main thing you would want to do from the place screen is find and interact with an image for a given app. So how can we do this?

Finding App Icons

Ultimately, what would be nice to have code-wise is a handy. Let & # x27; s imagine that this is our test method implementation, for model:

@ Test public void testSpringboard () {wait.until (AppIconPresent (`` Reminders '')) .click (); pressHome (); wait.until (AppIconPresent (`` Contacts '')) .click (); pressHome ();}

Here we have created a custom expected precondition phone AppIconPresent, which takes the app ikon text, and will try to regain that image, navigating through the different & quot; pages & quot; of the Springboard if the image is not already present. This is actually conceptually a bit tricky, because of how the Springboard app is implemented. No matter how many pages you have in your Springboard, all pages present up within the current UI hierarchy. This means it is easy to find an icon for an app still if it & # x27; s not on the currently-displayed page. However, if you try totapthat icon, it will not work (because the icon is not really visible). So, we ask some way of picture out how to move to the correct page before tip. Let & # x27; s examine the implementation of AppIconPresent:

protected ExpectedConditionAppIconPresent (final String appName) {pressHome (); curPage = 1; return new ExpectedCondition() {@ Override public WebElement apply (WebDriver driver) {try {return driver.findElement (By.xpath (`` // * [@ name='Home screen icons '] '' + `` //XCUIElementTypeIcon [`` + curPage + ``] '' + `` /XCUIElementTypeIcon [@ name= ' '' + appName + `` '] ''));} gimmick (NoSuchElementException err) {swipeToNextScreen (); curPage += 1; throw err;}}};}

Read:

The maiden thing we do is call our pressHome supporter method (which is simply another method implemented in the current class). It looks like this:

protect void pressHome () {driver.executeScript (`` mobile: pressButton '', ImmutableMap.of (`` name '', `` home ''));}

(I just have it as a skillful benefactor to avert redefining the executeScript args all the time). What call pressHome here does is ensure that we are perpetually on the first page of the Springboard. Then, we set a class field to delineate what page we are on. We initialize it to 1, because after pressing the home button, we know we are on the first page. Then, in our real condition check execution, we try to find an icon that has the gens we & # x27; ve been given to detect.

Also read:

Here & # x27; s the tricky part: we don & # x27; t require to merely findanyicon that has the correct name (because then we would find the icon even if it & # x27; s not on the current page). We only want to find an icon on thecurrent page(and then sneak to the next page if we can & # x27; t bump it). To do that, we take advantage of a fact about Springboard & # x27; s UI hierarchy, which is that each page is actually slang up as an XCUIElementTypeIcon, which contains the actual app icons as children. So given that we cognise what page we & # x27; re on, we can write an XPath query that restricts our hunting to the XML nodes corresponding to the current page!

See:

If we & # x27; re unable to discover an icon on the current page, we call another helper method, swipeToNextScreen. This is built off of the handy developed in an earliest post, and has a simple implementation that just performs a swipe from an country near the right edge of the blind over to the left:

protected emptiness swipeToNextScreen () {swipe (0.9, 0.5, 0.1, 0.5, Duration.ofMillis (750));}

Once we & # x27; ve swiped to the next screen, we increment our page counter because we have now moved to the next blind! Of course, we & # x27; re trust on the supposal that we will eventually find the app by the time we reach the last page, because we don & # x27; t experience any logic to detect whether our swipeToNextScreen was actually successful.

Also see:

In general, AppIconPresent is a outstanding exemplar of a useful custom expected condition that has a side effect. We construct it into an expected precondition so we can use it flexibly with the WebDriverWait interface, and so we don & # x27; t need to indite any of the iteration or retry logic ourselves. It & # x27; s also a outstanding representative of being clever (and hopefully nottooclever) with XPath!

So that & # x27; s it for automating the iOS home blind or & quot; Springboard & quot; app. Let me know if you detect any former interesting purpose for automating this app beyond using it as a launcher or a fast way to get an Appium session on a device! And as always, you can find thefull sample codefor this edition up on GitHub.

4 Parts

Connet Now