xPath for listing element in android (using appium automation)

Question

I have a scrollable listing (search results) in Android App and for Appium autonation, I need to select a particular element from it. Appium inspector is providing information like index, resource-id and xpath.

content-desc:
type: android.widget.TextView
text: AMI
index: 0
enabled: true
location: {60, 513}
size: {81, 61}
checkable: false
checked: false
focusable: false
clickable: false
long-clickable: false
package: com.abc.xyz.debug
password: false
resource-id: com.abc.xyz.debug:id/student_label_text
scrollable: false
selected: false

xPath for first result (provided by appium inspector) is like this:

//android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView[1]/android.widget.FrameLayout[1]/android.widget.FrameLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.FrameLayout[1]/android.widget.RelativeLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.TextView[1]

for second result it is..

//android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView[1]/android.widget.FrameLayout[2]/android.widget.FrameLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.FrameLayout[1]/android.widget.RelativeLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.TextView[1]

Above xPaths work but I am looking for shorter version. I tried various combinations but since I am new to this so not able to figure out the solution. Any help on this or any tools which can do this job?

Answer 1

Instead of XPath, you can use id right.

Using xpath will effect the speed of execution of our scripts.We can use id as shown below:

driver.findElement(By.id("student_label_text"))

XPath will take much time compared to id to identify the elements.

Answer 2

Best choice with Xpath usually is to find a unique value in any of the attributes of the element. From your example values, you could find by the text value:

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//android.widget.TextView[@text='AMI']"));

Since xpath is slower than other find strategies, you could first get all the elements that match with id and after that check what attribute values those elements have:

List<MobileElement> elements = driver.findElements(By.id("com.abc.xyz.debug:id/student_label_text"));
for (MobileElement element : elements) {
    if (element.getAttribute("text") == "AMI") {
        element.click();
    }
}

Note that I'm using findElements instead of findElement to get a List of all matching elements.

The usage of getAttribute command is not very well documented.. It took some digging to find out all the accepted names for attributes:

https://github.com/appium/appium-android-bootstrap/blob/master/bootstrap/src/io/appium/android/bootstrap/AndroidElement.java#L182

and

https://github.com/appium/appium-android-bootstrap/blob/master/bootstrap/src/io/appium/android/bootstrap/AndroidElement.java#L94