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Basic Appium Automation: Part 3— Using Locators (Android)

Basic Appium Automation: Part 3— Using Locators (Android)

How To Use the Accessibility ID, ID, XPath and Class Name Locators in Android

Courtney Zhan's avatar
Courtney Zhan
Jul 29, 2024
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The Agile Way
Basic Appium Automation: Part 3— Using Locators (Android)
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In Part 1, we covered the available locator types in Appium 2. In Part 2, we looked at using locators for iOS. In this article, let’s look at creating a sample script using a few different locator types for an Android app.

Key Points

  • Using the Accessibility ID, ID, XPath and Class Name Locators in a sample Android app

  • Using the find_element method to locate a single element

  • Using thefind_elements method to locate multiple elements with the same locator

Sample App

This article uses Appium’s Sample Android Test App. This is available on Appium’s Github page as a sample app. Download and save the ApiDemos-debug.apk file.

This test app contains a simple addition calculator, which we will use to try out the AccessibilityID, Name, XPath and Class locator types.

Android Calculator App — Accessibility ID, Name, XPath, Class Locators

The Appium capabilities to start up the Appium session are:

app_file = File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), "..", "..", "sample-apps", "ApiDemos-debug.apk")

opts = {
  caps: {
    automationName: 'UiAutomator2',
    platformName: 'Android',
    platform: 'Android',
    platformVersion: '12',
    deviceName: 'emulator-5554',    
    app: app_file,
    appPackage: 'io.appium.android.apis',
    appActivity: 'io.appium.android.apis.ApiDemos'
  },
  appium_lib: {
    server_url: "http://127.0.0.1:4723"
  },
}

You can copy these into Appium Inspector as well:

The API Demos app features a lot of different Android components. For this demo, we’ll be navigating through the catalog, then showing and hiding a header field.

Let’s look at each section one by and one and identify some locators.

1. App Menu

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