Need to identify xpath for android element using appium

Question

I am testing my Android application using Appium framework. I have an android screen that doesn't have ids for its views (and I don't want to add...), so I thought using Xpath.

This is how the screen looks like in UI Automator Viewer:

I want to get all the relative layouts (marked in red - sixteen items)

I tried the following:

 List<WebElement> webElementslist =
 mAppDriver.findElementsByXPath("//android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.FrameLayout[1]/android.widget.RelativeLayout[1]/android.widget.ViewAnimator[1]/android.widget.FrameLayout[1]/android.widget.RelativeLayout[1]/android.widget.RelativeLayout[1]/android.widget.RelativeLayout[1]/android.widget.ScrollView[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[2]");

But I didn't get any items.

I searched the web and found the next xpath tutorials, tried more options, but again with no success.

http://www.zvon.org/comp/r/tut-XPath_1.html#intro

http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/

Would appreciate any help.

Answer 1

Right now there's a couple nasty bugs with XPath on android that explain the behaviors you're seeing. They are scheduled to be fixed in the 1.3.1 release

1. You can't search by root nodes.. link
   • Unfortunately, this means that a verbose xpath is likely the xpath^(pun) to success
2. You sometimes get 240 of an element when you only have 16 link

Ideally, you could look for the resource-id of the android.widget.LinearLayout parent of all 16 RelativeLayouts and then do something like:

//android.widget.LinearLayout[@resource-id="foo"]/android.widget.RelativeLayout

---

Your verbose solution did not work because you gave one of the layouts a position of [2].

Here it is, fixed:

//android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.FrameLayout[1]/android.widget.RelativeLayout[1]/android.widget.ViewAnimator[1]/android.widget.FrameLayout[1]/android.widget.RelativeLayout[1]/android.widget.RelativeLayout[1]/android.widget.RelativeLayout[1]/android.widget.ScrollView[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout/android.widget.RelativeLayout

.... please, please use the first solution.

I'm looking into a solution for your problem using UiAutomator locator strategy, but no answers yet (because .fromChild() and .fromParent() seem to be broken)