Chapter-6: Walkthrough of UIAutomator for Android and Accessibility Inspector for iOS

In the last chapter we discussed the Appium Inspector tool and learned how we can extract the elements for any application. Appium Inspector is a great tool to extract elements from Android and iOS both. However, it can take some time to do so.

There is another way: UiAutomatorViewer(Mac & Windows) and Accessibility Inspector(Mac) is a handy tool to extract the elements from Android and iOS Applications respectively.

The reason why UiAutomatorViewer and Accessibility Inspector is fast because it does not involves the application installation part, it just fetches the XML structure of the current screen on the device, no matter which application is open and displayed.

In this chapter we will look into UiAutomatorViewer and Accessibility Inspector tools deeply.

1. UiAutomatorViewer:

UiAutomatorViewer is the Android SDK part and it’s packaged with it, so you don’t need to install it separately. It’s a tool like Appium Inspector which lets you inspect the UI(XML Structure) of the application and gives you the attributes of UI element.

NOTE: Before using this tool make sure SDK is properly downloaded and the PATH is set properly.

The first step to work with UiAutomatorViewer is you need to connect the Real(Physical) Android device with your computer (using USB cable).
Once you connect the device you can find the device name using: $ adb devices

Figure-1: Android device is connected.
- If your device is not connected properly then you might get error: “No Android devices were detected by adb. ”

Figure-2: No Android device is connected error dialog

After connecting the device, you need to open UiAutomatorViewer from SDK directory. You can find UiAutomatorViewer under Android SDK>tools>bin directory.

Figure-3: Path to UiAutomatorViewer on Mac

Figure-4: UiAutomatorViewer on Mac

Figure-5: UiAutomatorViewer Window on Mac

Now open the specific application screen on connected device for which you want to extract the elements.
In order to fetch that screen’s XML structure you need to press the (second) mobile icon on UiAutomatorViewer window.

Figure-6: Click on second Mobile icon

Figure-7: Obtaining Device screenshot and fetching-XML structure

Figure-8: Sample application screen

You can observe here that left side part gives you the screenshot of the current screen from your connected device and the right side is divided into 2 parts

The upper half contains the XML hierarchy of Screen and selected node.
The lower half contains the selected node’s attributes with their values.
Now you can get the valid selectors such as cont-desc(accessibility id), id, class name, xpath etc. from the attributes section and start automating the application right away

Following table gives the mapping between attributes and Appium locator strategies:

Attribute	Locator Strategy
text	Name
resource-id	Id
class	Class Name
content-desc	Accessibility Id

So, as you can see this tool is pretty much similar to Appium Inspector, but the only
difference is this tool doesn't take much time to get UI element locators.
You just need to connect your device and click on the mobile icon on UiAutomatorViewer as simple as that!

2. Accessibility Inspector:

Accessibility Inspector is a common Inspector tool included in XCode and specially designed for Mac OS to get the basic details such as Label, Title, Value and Type for any UI element from opened application on Mac OS.

Actually it does not gives many details and attributes of UI elements but it is handy tool to get the basic information about the element rapidly.

On Spotlight Search, search for the Xcode and open it.

Figure-9: XCode on Spotlight Search

After XCode is open, on the Menu bar Select the XCode > Open Developer Tool > Accessibility Inspector

Figure-10: Accessibility Inspector on XCode

Below is the dialog of Accessibility Inspector.

Figure-11: Accessibility Inspector

1. Now open iOS Simulator and open the application for which you want to extract the locators
2. Now click on this icon: and select the “Compute Sum” textfield on Simulator.

Figure-12: Locate the selector on Accessibility Inspector.

So as you can see you can get the Basic attributes such as Label, Title, Value and Type. While you use Appium Inspector you can get many attributes, please refer the image below:

Figure-13: Locate the selector on Appium Inspector.

Here, Appium Inspector adds more value to iOS part as Accessibility Inspector provides only
basics values which in some case might not fruitful.
There are also many third party software and tools available which helps to identify the ui locators
Ultimately you will figure out which tool best fits into your workflow, but it is a good idea to
have a broad understanding of the choices at your disposal.