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Mar 2016

Can I have an alternative way to find element by accessibilityId?
Because my company application is an old, the application does't have Ids (Android: resource-id, iOS: accessibilityId).

So it is a huge impact for me that I can't find elements by name locator.
Probably I need to modify test codes from "name" to "xpath" if I want to update Appium@1.5.0?

My bandage solution for working around By.name was using this xpath expression: //*[@name='name'] I don't have insight into the reasons behind deprecating the name strategy early with Appium 1.0, but I guess it has something to do with the fact that the name strategy's Selenium documented and intended behavior did not match with the behavior of Appium's name strategy.

Thx, afwang!

That works instead of name locator on ruby_lib!

value = "//*[@name='" + "name you wanted" + "']"
find_element(:xpath, value)

using the appium app??
I dont know how to start server using command prompt
can u tell me

Just type appium and hit enter will start appium server. but, i just wanted to know, which programming language and type of framework you are going to use. So that we can help you further.

i m gonna use Java language for autmation of an android app...I was trying to automate a login page...i am writing my scripts in Eclipse

you can also follow some basic examples like this23 and then let us know in this forum, if you are struck up somewhere.

This is a valid question @jlipps @penguinho @jonahss, because in lots of apps (probably most of them) devs do not apply ids on all elements and using xpath does not seem a good alternative.

Can you post why this happened and if there is any other alternative besides xpath?

Thanks

Xpath is a completely viable solution, and in fact allows you to continue using "name".

I have been doing ALL of my Appium development using xpath exclusively and successfully. But I'm forced to do this as my AUT doesn't currently have accessibility IDs at this time. So visible text is my only unique identifier I can rely on. And some don't even have "name" attribute (protected password entry fields, for example). Thus xpath to the rescue.

locators["settings.security_notifications_slider_label"] = '//UIAStaticText[@name="Security Notifications"]'

The reason people jump to saying "xpath is bad, never use xpath" is when they're composing horribly brittle xpath based on meaningless nested indexes like:

'//UIATableGroup[2]/UIATableCell[7]/UIAStaticText[4]'

Better yet xpath allows you to find elements based on specific relationships in the page source using xpath axes.

locators["cases_and_contracts.special_all_open_cases"] = \
'//UIATableGroup[@name="SPECIAL"]/following-sibling::UIATableCell[@name="All Open Cases"]'

So go explore xpath, I think you'll find it a functionally successful method of locating your elements.

Hai Everyone..

I am using Appium1.4.16 in Ubuntu14.04.. I need to upgrade to Appium1.5.0..
How can I do that..??

@pr4bh4sh I tried both AccessibilityID and XPath, I found that XPath is much more slower than AccessibilityID. If I find an element by AccessibilityID, it will need less then 1 second, but for XPath, it will probably need 3 seconds. It is really too slow to run a full regression testing. Do you have the similar issue?