Automating hybrid apps

One of the core principles of Appium is that you shouldn’t have to change your app to test it. In line with that methodology, it is possible to test hybrid web apps (e.g., the UIAWebView elements in an iOS app) the same way you can with Selenium for web apps. There is a bit of technical complexity required so that Appium knows whether you want to automate the native aspects of the app or the web views, but thankfully, we can stay within the WebDriver protocol for everything.

Here are the steps required to talk to a web view in your Appium test://测试混合应用的步骤

1. Navigate to a portion of your app where a web view is active
2. Call GET session/:sessionId/contexts
3. This returns a list of contexts we can access, like ‘NATIVE_APP’ or ‘WEBVIEW_1’
4. Call POST session/:sessionId/context with the id of the context you want to access
5. (This puts your Appium session into a mode where all commands are interpreted as being intended for automating the web view, rather than the native portion of the app. For example, if you run getElementByTagName, it will operate on the DOM of the web view, rather than return UIAElements. Of course, certain WebDriver methods only make sense in one context or another, so in the wrong context you will receive an error message).
6. To stop automating in the web view context and go back to automating the native portion of the app, simply call context again with the native context id to leave the web frame.

 1 // java
 2 // assuming we have a set of capabilities
 3 driver = new AppiumDriver(new URL("http://127.0.0.1:4723/wd/hub"), capabilities);
 4 
 5 Set<String> contextNames = driver.getContextHandles();
 6 for (String contextName : contextNames) {
 7     System.out.println(contextNames); //prints out something like NATIVE_APP \n WEBVIEW_1
 8 }
 9 driver.context(contextNames.toArray()[1]); // set context to WEBVIEW_1
10 
11 //do some web testing
12 String myText = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(".green_button")).click();
13 
14 driver.context("NATIVE_APP");
15 
16 // do more native testing if we want
17 
18 driver.quit();

 1 # python
 2 # assuming we have an initialized `driver` object for an app
 3 
 4 # switch to webview
 5 webview = driver.contexts.last
 6 driver.switch_to.context(webview)
 7 
 8 # do some webby stuff
 9 driver.find_element(:css, ".green_button").click
10 
11 # switch back to native view
12 driver.switch_to.context(driver.contexts.first)
13 
14 # do more native testing if we want
15 
16 driver.quit()

Automating hybrid Android apps

Appium comes with built-in hybrid support via Chromedriver. Appium also uses Selendroid under the hood for webview support on devices older than 4.4. (In that case, you’ll want to specify "automationName": "selendroid" as a desired capability).//低于4.4的安卓版本，需要用Selendroid测试混合应用。其余的版本，通过内置的Chromedriver测试混合应用。

Make sure setWebContentsDebuggingEnabled is set to true as described in the remote debugging docs.

Once you’ve set your desired capabilities and started an appium session, follow the generalized instructions above.

Automating hybrid iOS apps

To interact with a web view appium establishes a connection using a remote debugger. When executing against a simulator this connection is established directly as the simulator and the appium server are on the same machine.//同一个电脑上的iOS模拟器与appium server会直接建立连接。

Once you’ve set your desired capabilities and started an appium session, follow the generalized instructions above.

Execution against a real iOS device

When executing against a real iOS device appium is unable to access the web view directly. Therefore the connection has to be established through the USB lead. To establish this connection we use the ios-webkit-debugger-proxy.//iOS真机通过代理与appium server取得连接。

For instruction on how to install and run ios-webkit-debugger-proxy see iOS webkit debug proxy documentation.

Now you can start an appium test session and follow the generalized instructions above.

Automating hybrid apps