Windows Desktop Applications Test Automation in WinAppDriver

This video is an introduction to WinAppDriver UI Recorder. Apart from definition of what is Windows Application Driver UI Recorder, this video also shows you how to download and run it. You will also learn how to find various properties of different application controls using WinAppDriver UI Recorder and use them in automated testing and UI automation for RPA.

How to type text in a UI Automation script using Appium WinAppDriver and C# .Net.

How to use Selenium/Appium implicit wait to slow down an Appium WinAppDriver test automation script written in C# .Net or any other programming language such as Java/Python.

When this course was created first, we relied solely on the WinAppDriver UI Recorder for inspecting various elements of Windows applications we’d be automating.

I recently came across another tool which we can use for looking into various application elements .

I’ve added this new section to the course to show you just that because I believe it has the potential to make your life easier.

This tool is called Appium Desktop.

You can download it from Appium’s website.

Before we proceed, please remember there are two prerequisites for using Appium Desktop.

One, you need to enable Developer Mode on your Windows 10 PC.

Two, you need to have WinAppDriver 1.1 or above installed on your PC.

Please note that you don’t need to install Node.js before this.

Let me google quickly Appium Desktop client and show you.

We are going to click the link titled “Appium desktop for OSX, Windows and Linux.

This will take us to the github repository of the Appium Desktop project.

You will need to download the Appium-windows.exe from here and use it to install Appium desktop.

Once you’ve got Appium Desktop installed, you can proceed to the next videos.

In the next video, we’ll start using Appium Desktop for inspecting Windows Applications.

Please note that you can use the same utility to inspect apps on other Appium supported platforms sucnh as Android and iOSas well, if you have proper tools installed.

Although that’s beyond the scope of this course.

See you in the next video.

Before we proceed with using Appium Desktop Client, please start the WinAppDriver.exe file.

Now let’s run Appium Desktop Client, you’ll be able to find it in your Windows applications.

Click the “Start” button and type Appium.

Now click the “Appium” icon and open the application. The Appium desktop client can take a few seconds to load.

On the main Appium UI, go to the “File” menu and select “New Session Window”

A new dialog box will open up.

The tab “Custom Server” will be selected.

I’ll leave the remote host and remote port fields unchanged.

In the Remote Path field is important here, I’m going to put a forward slash.

Then there’s this table like Ui to specify Desired Capabilities.

I am going to click on the first text box that contains the text “Name” and type the word app in there.

The word app will be small.

In the value textbox, I’ll paste the user mode ID of the calculator app.

I’ve shown you already how to find this value, otherwise you can download it from the resources section of this video.

Microsoft.WindowsCalculator_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App

If you notice, there’s a field “JSON Representation” on the right hand side of the UI. This is being computed based on the desired capabilities you are specifying.

Now Appium Client is going to connect the instance of WinAppDriver which is running on this PC and listening on port number 4723. Remember, we started it earlier.

I’ll press the button “Start Session”

The calculator app will start and you’ll get a preview inside the Appium UI inspector.

You can hover the mouse on various controls of the application under test and those controls will be highlighted in yellow.

Let’s end this video here and learn more about the Appium UI Inspector in the next video.

Once we have created a session in Appium Client we will be able to inspect various elements of the loaded application.

The UI is pretty simple.

There’s a row of button on the top, “Select Elements” is clicked by default.

Then we have the application preview loaded on one side, “App Source” in the middle showing the hierarchy of application controls.

The right most panel is “Selected Element”, it will populate when we’ll click an element.

In order to do so, we will hover the mouse on the application preview shown in the Appium Desktop Client.

You will see that the element under the cursor will highlight yellow.

Let’s click on the button two in the application preview. You see it’s color will change.

You’ll see all attributes of this Windows Element will load in the right hand side pane.

Same thing will happen if we click on the calculation results textbox on the top.

This is how you can use the Appium desktop client to inspect Windows applications.

Other options on this screen aren’t much useful.

You can now play with the inspector further to see more options.

I am going to close it now.

In the next video I’ll show you how to use the appArguments desired capability in Appium Desktop Client.

We can specify more additional capabilities using Appium Desktop Client.

This is something not available in WinAppDriver UI Recorder.

For example, if we want to open Notepad with a file loaded into it already.

Let us create a new session.

In the app default capability, I’ll put “Notepad”.

Then I’ll click the plus sign and add appArguments in the desired capabilities.

In the value field, I’ll put the path of the file which we want to open.

"C:\Users\Naeem\Desktop\bunch of text.txt"

I’ll click the “Start Session” button.

You’ll see that the file you specified as a parameter will open.

Same technique can be used with Excel to open a file right out of the gates.

There are some applications which show a splash screen when they launch.

The splash is mistakenly considered the main application window by the WinAppDriver and this leads to automation failure.

If you’re using WinAppDriver 1.2 RC, you can also make the WinAppDriver wait a little bit so that the splash goes away and then the WinAppDriver attaches to the application window.

For example, lets try a demo with Outlook.

I am going to launch it in straight forward way first of all.

I’ll create a new session window and I’ll put Outlook against “app” in desired capabilities.

You’ll see that the app preview will not load. The progress animation will keep spinning.

Let’s close the session window and come again.

This time, I’m going to add a new Desired Capability.

In the name field I’ll put ms:waitForAppLaunch

In the value field I’ll put the number 15.

Now I’ll click the “Start Session” button.

This time around you’ll see that the application preview will take a while to load in the Appium Desktop Client.

Now you can check all properties of the Windows Elements inside this application too.

This is the end of this video, I hope it was useful.

Cheatsheet of chapter 3 contains various useful information you may use later on.

Using Assertions to pass or fail Appium Test Automation with Ms Test and WinAppDriver in C# .Net.

Every automation test has got a life-cycle. It is true for all types of tests including unit test, integration test, and end to end (funciton/ui) test. The life-cycle is independent of the testing technology. Be it Appium or Selenium.

PDF file containing important shortcuts related to this section.

1. We are going to have some more fun with the Windows 10 Alarms application in this video.

2. Remember we created a solution using this application in the last section.

3. That solution can be downloaded from the downloads section of this lecture.

4. I’ve opened the solution.

5. The scenario we are going to automate is that we’re going to select the clock tab and add a new location to the clocks here.

6. Let’s add a new test method

[TestMethod]

public void VerifyNewClockCanBeAdded()

1. Next, we need to identify the controls.

2. I’ll minimize VS and open the clock application \and the UI recorder side by side.

3. Then I’ll first hover the mouse on the clocks icon which I want to click.

4. Now go back to the recorder and copy the value of “AutomationID” ID.

5. Let’s head back to the Visual Studio, find the control and click it.

sessionAlarms.FindElementByAccessibilityId("ClockButton").Click();

1. // let’s put a comment here about what this line does

2. Now for next step, Let’s find the properties of plus button and click it.

3. Let’s hover mouse on the plus button

4. It has name property "Add new clock"

5. Let’s click this button.

6. Now go back to the clocks application.

7. I’ll click the + button manually and a textbox will show up as a result.

8. It has an automation id value “TextBox”, not very helpful.

9. But, it’s name is unique. Let’s copy it and use it to find the control.

10. I’ll put the textbox object in a variable.

var txtLocation = sessionAlarms.FindElementByName("Enter a location");

1. We’ll send it a value from the keyboard,

txtLocation.SendKeys("Lahore, Pakistan");

1. And then, we’ll send an enter key on the same control.

2. txtLocation.SendKeys(Keys.Enter);

3. You’ll need to bring in the namespace for the Keys.Enter.

4. I already have the tile for Lahore, Pakistan. Let me delete it and close clocks application.

5. Now let’s run all the tests.

6. If they fail, don’t worry.

7. Add a small thread sleep call after clicking the first button.

8. System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);

9. Delay tactics like these are every test engineers best friend.

10. A more sophisticated way to achieve the same is using WebDriverWait. We’ll cover it later on.

1. The WebDriverWait class is provided by Appium and Selenium to make it possible for our test scripts to wait until some condition is true.

2. For example, we might wait until the txtLocation is displayed.

3. Let’s head over to our code to the point where we called Thread.Sleep in previous video.

4. We’re going to create a new object of WebDriverWait here.

5. WebDriverWait waitForMe = new WebDriverWait();

6. Lets bring in the namespace.

7. The first parameter of this method will be the session object which we created earlier since it derives from IWebDriver

8. The second parameter will be a new instance of TimeSpan class.

9. WebDriverWait waitForMe = new WebDriverWait(sessionAlarms, new TimeSpan.Fromseconds(10));

10. To make it wait until a specific condition is true, we’ll call the method Until on this object.

11. waitForMe.Until(

12. This method takes a lambda expression as a parameter, which should evaluate to either true or false.

13. Such parameters are also called predicates.

14. We’ll put a name here and then equals greater than sign and then the condition which we want to evaluate using the supplied object.

15. waitForMe.Until(pred =>

16. txtLocation.Displayed);

17. Do take note of this technique, it can be a huge life saver.

18. You may now run the program to see what happens.

How to perform right click on a WindowsElement using Appium Actions class.

Demo of running an automated test in WinAppDriver, Appium, C#.Net.

How did we click the clock button?

sessionAlarms.FindElementByAcessibilityId(“ClockButton”).Click();

How did we click the + buttom?

sessionAlarms.FindElementByName(“Add new clock”).Click();

How to press enter key on a WindowsElement txtLocation?

txtLocation.SendKeys(Keys.Enter);

What is the namespace which we need to import to use keys?

OpenQA.Selenium;

What is a rudemntary way to make your scripts wait for something?

System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000):

Which WebDriver class is used to make scripts wait?

WebDriverWait

What is the namespace of WebDriverWait?

OpenQA.Selenium.Support.UI

How do we create an instance of WebDriverWait class?

WebDriverWait waitForMe = new WebDriverWait(sessionAlarms, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10));

How do we call the Until method on WebDriverWait instance?

waitForMe.Until(pred => txtLocation.Displayed);

How do we find all elements in a session or under an element which contain same AutomationId?

sessionAlarms.FindElementsByAccessibilityId(“WorldClockItemGrid”);

How do we check if the text of a Windows Element starts with a specific value?

If(clockTile.Text.StartsWitn(“Lahore, Pakistan”)) {}

Which Appium class is used to perform right click?

Actions

How do we create an instance of Actions class?

Ations actionForRightClick = new Actions(sessionAlarms);

How do we move mouse to an element?

actionForRightClick.MoveToElement(objectOfWindowsElement);

What method is used to perform right click or context click?

actionForRightClick.ContextClick();

Which method of Actions class is used to perform the steps contained by the Actions object?

actionsRightClick.Perform();

How do we create a desktop or root session?

AppiumOptions optionsDesktop = new AppiumOptions);

optionsDesktop.AddAdditionalCapability(“app”, “Root”);

WindowsDriver<WindowsElement> sessionDesktop = new WindowsDriver<WindowsElement>(new Uri(“http://127.0.0.1:4723”), optionsDesktop);

How do we create an instance of WebDriverWait using desktop session?

WebDriverWait waitForMe = new WebDriverWait(sessionDesktop, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10));

1. In order to access data available with a data driven test in MSTest, we need to use an object of TestContext class.

2. An object of test context class is supplied by the framework as a parameter to the ClassInitialize method.

3. We’re going to go to the class initialize method which we created earlier and save the value to a class level member.

4. Let’s do the assignment in the class initialize method.

5. objTestContext = testContext;

6. Now make the Visual Studio generate a field for us.

7. In the upcoming videos, we’re going to use this instance of objTestContext in our data driven test.

URL for downloading Ace Ole DB driver.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-pk/download/details.aspx?id=13255

Using Appium Windows Application Driver for test automation to click a checkbox WinForms elemebnt/control.

This video shows you how you can update an Appium 3 project to Appium 4. Which packages will be updated and how to fix errors.

A radio button is a close friend of CheckBox. But there are some differences as well. I show you how to write test automation code using WinAppDriver and Appium in C# .Net.

How to inspect a combo box with WAD UI Recorder to find useful properties. This information will be later on used for automated UI testing of a Windows WinForms .Net desktop application in Appium and C# .net.

Child items of a combo box include a button to click and open the combo. There's also a text area from where we can retrieve the text of a combo box. The same can be used to send keystrokes to select item or to click on the UI item with Appium WinAppDriver and C#.

Clicking a data grid in test automation can be complex. I show in this video how to retrieve various elements inside a grid control and how to click them using Appium WinAppDriver.

A Windows TreeView control is easy to automate with test automation. How to use Appium Actions class to find Windows user interface controls and find using Appium Find method calls to perform click operation and retrieve various attributes of the controls.

How to use UI automation to click on the OK button of an alert popup using Appium WinAppDriver, and C#. Two techniques are shown, one using XPath and other finding elements step by step.

In this video I show you how to click an item in a ListBox or a combo if the item is way down below and not being displayed initially.

I show you two techniques, one clicking the down button of the Windows list box control and the other pressing the down key on the ListBox(or combo) to make the non-displayed(hidden) element visible and then click it.

As you know Appium WinAppDriver can't operate on control if its displayed property is false

In order to select multiple items in a listbox, you'll have to hold down the Ctrl Key and then click mouse on multiple items.

This piece of code shows how to do just that.

How to retrieve the checked state of a checkbox?

check.Selected

What is the replacement of Appium 3 DeiredCapabilities class in Appium 4?

AppiumOptions

What is the replacement of method SetCability in Appium 4?

AddAdditionalCapability

How to retrieve the checked state of a checkbox?

radio.Selected

What are the two children of a combo box control?

1. A textbox

2. A button with ID = “Open”

Which control is displayed when the open button of a combo is clicked?

List

How are the items of a list reprsented by WinAppDriver?

ListItem with a Name property

Why aren’t list items visible without clicking the Open button?

Because their “Displayed” property is set to false.

Why aren’t list items visible without clicking the Open button?

Because their “Displayed” property is set to false.

Which method can be called on a ComboBox WindowsElement to set text easily?

SendKeys method with a value which is present in the combo box.

Which method can be called on a ComboBox WindowsElement to set text easily?

SendKeys method with a value which is present in the combo box.

How can we click the Open button of a WinForms combo box?

Combo.FindElementByName(“Open”);

After clicking the combo open button, how did we retrieve the list of combo items?

Combo.FindElementsByTagName(“ListItem”);

How to wait for a combo box child item to show up

WebDriverWait wdvCombo = new WebDriverWait(session, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10));

Wdv.until(x => comboKid.Displayed);

What is the tag name of menu items?

MenuItem

How to get the value of any attribute of a WindowsElement?

Item.GetAttribute(“Name”);

What is the tag name of header cells in a grid?

Header

What is the tag name of cell items in a grid?

DataItem

Which property is used to access the text contents of a grid cell?

Text

Code for double clicking an element

Actions actsTree = new Actions(sessionWinForm);

actsTree.MoveToElement(nodeWorld);

actsTree.DoubleClick();

actsTree.Perform();

How can we click the contents of a grid cell if they’re not at the center?

Action.MoveToElement(cell, offsetXAxis, offsetYAxis);

This lecture shows you how to launch Microsoft Excel with WinAppDriver.

How to use appArguments with AddAdditionalCapabilitiy method call. I also show how to open a file with Excel.

In this video I show you how to use Excel data in a test in a non-series fashion.

You'll learn how to use the ExcelDataReader library and ExcelDataReader.DataSet extension for this purpose.

We are going to load in data from an Excel file.

How to utilize Newtonsoft JSON a.k.a JSON.Net in your Appium based test automation.

How to launch Excel using AppiumOptions?

appOptions.AddAdditionalCapability(“app”, “Excel”);

How to specify application arguments for launch time e.g. launch Excel without a splash screen

appOptions.AddAdditionalCapability(“appArguments”, “/e”);

How to open an Excel instance with a file loaded already

appOptions.AddAdditionalCapability(“appArguments”, “c:\filepath\filename.xlsx”);

How to both open Excel without a splash screen and load a file by default

appOptions.AddAdditionalCapability(“appArguments”, “/e c:\filepath\filename.xlsx”);

Code for opening an Excel file using ExcelReader

using (var stream = File.Open(@"C:\Users\Naeem\Desktop\TestConfigData.xlsx", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read))

{

using (var reader = ExcelReaderFactory.CreateReader(stream))

{

mTestData = reader.AsDataSet(

new ExcelDataSetConfiguration()

{

ConfigureDataTable = (tableReader) => new ExcelDataTableConfiguration()

{

UseHeaderRow = true

}

}

);

}

}

How to select a data row from a DataTable

Var returnRow = mTestData.Tables[tableName].Select($”DataKey=’dataKey’”);

The library used in this course to read JSON from file

Newtonsoft JSON.Net

URL of the website to verify the correct of JSON

Jsonformatter.org

Code to read data into a JObject from a text file and parse it.

JObject.Parse(File.ReadAllText(@”c:\path\file.json”));

A brief overview of the section about running Appium WinAppDriver based tests with vstest.console.exe. As a matter of fact, the same technique can be used to run CodedUI tests or simple unit tests.

In this video I show you how to run test automation without Visual Studio. We use the vstest.console.exe to run all automated tests present inside a test assembly(.dll). In our case these are Appium based WinAppDriver test automation scripts written in C# .Net. We use the Developer Command Prompt which comes with Visual Studio to launch these tests.

Test reports are a very important artifact produced by the test automation activity. In this video I will show you how to generate a test run report without any extra effort. We will generate a .trx file which stands for "Test Run" and x is I suppose extra or extension or execution maybe. But in any case you will learn how to generate a report which can be viewed in any version of Visual Studio.

You don't need to add additional reporting packages such as Extent reports or Allure. No additional code is needed to be added to your Appium WinAppDriver test automation scripts as well.

I show you some more options about running the test automation scripts. First of all how to see the list of all available tests inside a MSTest Appium WinAppDriver test assembly. Secondly how to run only one test from a file. Thirdly, how to run automated tests with a test name matching a pattern such as ~ListBox means run all automation scripts which have a name containing the word ListBox.

This is how you'll see we run our Appium WinAppDriver automated testing scripts written to test a WinForms ListBox control.

A dump of vstest.console.exe help through command prompt.

Cheatsheet document of this section for quick reference.

Sometimes you need to create a session with an existing application window. Although this scenario is documented on the GitHub page of WinAppDriver, it can still be challenging to implement it. That's why I decided to post the video here.

https://www.udemy.com/course/windows-ui-automation-on-azure-devops-build-pipelines/?referralCode=31F4FCC272434D3B1C3C

An introduction to my new course about running Windows UI Automation through AzureDevOps.