Cannot compute child count in ListView, RecyclerView or any other scrollable view in Android with Appium

I agree. This is a pretty major pain when writing tests with Appium.

I can understand some of the difficulties with implementing some feature to count the number of items in a list view, however. Robotium and Espresso (white box, instrumented tests in general) have the advantage of being white box tests, so they can query the adapter backing the list view directly for the information of the child elements (and they can also control the list view to scroll to exact positions). OTOH, UiAutomator was intended for black box tests, since the benefit of UiAutomator was to switch between various different apps in different processes. Unfortunately, this also meant that UiAutomater loses the ability to query adapters and list views for the number of data items.

If I know my UiAutomator well, UiCollection and UiScrollable will scroll through the list and search the child elements that match a particular UiSelector and not necessarily count all the child elements of the list.

Ask your Android dev's to set content description as value(index + some string) in there get view method. Now if you scroll also that element will contain adapter index in the content description field.

This will give unique element.

Now If Appium provides a method to scrolltoelement like it provided scrolltoexact then it would be a great help.

Please tag Appium owners or community developers.

@jlipps @isaac @sebv @jonahss

Hi Team,

Can we have these two methods provided by UIScrollable class with appium client

scrollIntoView(UiSelector selector)
Perform a scroll forward action to move through the scrollable layout element until a visible item that matches the selector is found.

scrollDescriptionIntoView(String text)
Performs a forward scroll action on the scrollable layout element until the content-description is found, or until swipe attempts have been exhausted.

@khageshkapilSD

For the time being you can use below code

String contentDescription = "Ad List Container 8";

String uiSelector = "new UiSelector().descriptionContains(\"" + contentDescription + "\")";

((AndroidDriver) MobileAndriodTestDriverImpl.driver).findElementByAndroidUIAutomator("new UiScrollable(new UiSelector().scrollable(true).instance(0)).scrollIntoView("
        + uiSelector + ".instance(0));");

It will automatically scroll to the element which contains the given context description. All you need to ask your developer to append it.

@UD Ini tried using scrollTo but i didn't worked for me. I think it works on both content and text.

String uiScrollables =
UiScrollable("new UiSelector().descriptionContains(\"" + text + "\")") + UiScrollable(
"new UiSelector().textContains(\"" + text + "\")");
return findElementByAndroidUIAutomator(uiScrollables);

In my solution it only work on content description as in my case i need to verify the text from a web request.

Hello all - I see that the last post in this thread was April '16. I’m encountering the exact problem described here, and I was wondering if there is now any best practice or accepted convention for handling off-screen list items.

I’m trying to iterate through a list of titles and tap the one that I’m passing as a parameter, but the only items being recognized by Appium are the ones that are visible on the screen. I totally understand why this is happening - just wondering if, after a year and a half, there is a reliable, widely used method of dealing with this issue.

Thanks!

We are doing functional tests, so basically mimic what a person does using the app.

If we need to tap some tittle on a list that is not visible, how does a normal user does it?
If we need to count the elements that are present on a list, how does a normal user does it?

Just code those user actions.

I don’t want a function that returns a count of elements present, much less a value in content-description. Why should I trust that value? Its probably set by the same condition that may be causing a bug and we would not detect that bug.

I didn’t want a function that returned the count of elements either. I wanted to tap on a certain item in a list of unique titles if it is present.

I figured it out. I created a Set and added all of the visible titles in the list to that Set. Then I scrolled down and retrieved the next group of titles visible on the screen. If a title was not in the set, I added it and incremented a counter by 1. I repeat this scrolling and recording process until the counter equals 0 (or until the item that I want to tap is tapped), and then I know I’ve gone through all items in the list. If the items is found, it can be tapped without having to go through the whole list. If the counter equals zero, I’ve gone through the whole list without finding what I was looking for. So far, it’s working as expected for pass and fail scenarios.

Note: This probably isn’t the best solution for dealing with really long lists, but it works well within the scope of my app. Maximum “down swipes” might be 4 or 5, but it’s usually no more than two.

and how do you “scroll down” ? by using touch actions ?

Yes, I use TouchActions:

public static void scrollDown(AndroidDriver<MobileElement> driver, int numSwipes) {
		
		int counter = 0;
		
		while (counter < numSwipes) {
			
			TouchAction actionScrollDown = new TouchAction(driver);
			actionScrollDown = new TouchAction(driver).press(getScreenWidth(driver)/2, (int) (getScreenHeight(driver)*.8)).moveTo(0, (int) (-getScreenHeight(driver)*.8)).release();
			actionScrollDown.perform();
			
			try {
				Thread.sleep(500);
			} catch (InterruptedException e) {
				e.printStackTrace();
			}
			counter++;
		}	
	}

We’ve tried that as well , the problem is if the list contains too many items, it takes ages to find the item on the bottom of the list

Yeah, that’s why I added the note about the scope of the app that I’m testing. For our app, I think the max number of times that I ever have to swipe in either direction (or sideways) to get where I want to go is five. Unfortunately, I haven’t really looked into a solution for longer lists.

Hello,

_**

I am really find it very diifcult to scroll the particular recyclerview horizontal scroll after achieving the vertical scroll using label. I am automating android native music app, the recyclerview or the widget or textview doesnt have unique id … to make the driver to scroll the second recycler view appearing the screen. Can anyone pls help me in this case.

**_

I am using appium desktop 1.6 and java client 6 .

Vertical Scroll Code Snippet(works fine, but there is exception always throwing … but managed)

driver.findElement(MobileBy.AndroidUIAutomator(“new UiScrollable(new UiSelector().scrollable(true).className(“android.widget.LinearLayout”)).scrollIntoView(new UiSelector().resourceId(“com.touchtunes.android:id/home_widget_header”).text(“HOT AT MONTREAL RECEPTION ANGELINA”))”));

Horizontal Scroll Code Snippet(This scrolll only the first recycler view appearing in the screen, but the recycler which i want to scroll, appears as Second Recycler in the screen)
driver.findElement(MobileBy.AndroidUIAutomator(“new UiScrollable(new UiSelector().scrollable(true).className(“android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView”)).setAsHorizontalList().scrollIntoView(new UiSelector().resourceId(“com.touchtunes.android:id/item_hot_songs_song”).text(“Hotline Bling”))”)).click();