Writing Selenium/Appium Tests on Windows

Monday, 24 July 2023

Akademy, KDE’s annual conference, recently took place in Thessaloniki, Greece. Lots of people were super excited about the prospect of getting GUI Testing off the ground based on the Selenium tech I built last year. Since KDE produces cross-platform applications an obvious question arose though…

What about Windows?

It’s surprisingly easy! Indeed the most time consuming part is probably getting your hands on a Windows Development Virtual Machine. Once you have a Windows installation we need to only spin up our toolchain and off we go. Here’s a handy command list:

\# Download and install WinAppDriver: https://github.com/microsoft/WinAppDriver/releases

winget install openjs.nodejs
winget install python.python.3.11

npm install --location=global appium
# restart terminal to apply PATH change
set-executionpolicy -scope currentuser remotesigned # allow script execution
appium driver install --source=npm appium-windows-driver

pip install appium-python-client
appium # start server, needs firewall exception on first start

Before we go further into the nitty gritty of testing on Windows I suggest you read the earlier blog post Selenium + AT-SPI = GUI Testing, since a lot of the concepts are the same regardless of platform.

First let us get our ducks in a row.

What Accerciser is to Linux is inspect.exe to Windows, namely an inspector tool for applications. You can find it in your Windows SDK folder %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Windows Kits\10\bin\10.0.22000.0\x64\inspect.exe or there abouts. Opening it greets you with this beauty:

Ignoring the verbosity for a moment we’ll note that it contains similar information to Accerciser on Linux, albeit in a more flat overview. Most importantly what is called the AutomationId is constructed from QObject objectNames, similar to the Accessible IDs on Linux. This is insofar interesting as it means we have a couple of avenues for cross-platform element locating - specifically we could match elements by their name (e.g. the text of a Label or Button), or more uniquely by their objectName-based ID (applicable to all QObjects).

For the purposes of this post we’ll do some trivial testing on Filelight and try to make it work for both Linux and Windows by using the element names. Relying on objectNames is more reliable but unfortunately requires some retrofitting in the source code. To avoid having to build Filelight on Windows we’ll work with what we have got: names. Let’s write our test. Don’t forget to install Filelight first :)

First thing, as always, is our setup boilerplate

#!/usr/bin/env python3

# SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2023 Harald Sitter <sitter@kde.org>

import unittest
import sys
from appium import webdriver
from appium.options.windows import WindowsOptions
from appium.options.common import AppiumOptions
from appium.webdriver.common.appiumby import AppiumBy
from selenium.webdriver.support.wait import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected\_conditions as EC

class SimpleFilelightTests(unittest.TestCase):
    @classmethod
    def setUpClass(self):
        options = WindowsOptions()
        options.app('KDEe.V.Filelight\_7vt06qxq7ptv8!KDEe.V.Filelight')
        self.driver = webdriver.Remote(
            command\_executor='http://127.0.0.1:4723',
            options=options)

    @classmethod
    def tearDownClass(self):
        self.driver.quit()

if \_\_name\_\_ == '\_\_main\_\_':
    unittest.main()

The only really interesting bit here is how we specify the application on Windows. Since Filelight is a store application we can start it by the Application User Model ID (AUMID) instead of a path; this is pretty much the same as starting by-desktop-file-id on Linux.

Now then. With the boilerplate out of the way we can write an incredibly simple test that simply switches pages a bit: If we click on ‘Scan Home Folder’ it should take us to the scan page and clicking there on ‘Go to Overview’ should take us back to the overview page.

    def test\_scan(self):
        self.driver.find\_element(by=AppiumBy.NAME, value="Scan Home Folder").click()
        overview = WebDriverWait(self.driver, 120).until(
            EC.element\_to\_be\_clickable((AppiumBy.NAME, "Go to Overview"))
        )
        overview.click()
        WebDriverWait(self.driver, 4).until(
            EC.element\_to\_be\_clickable((AppiumBy.NAME, "Scan Home Folder"))
        )

Cool. We now can test Filelight on Windows. Next we should try to make this test also work for Linux. Thankfully we only need to switch out our app name for a desktop file id.

    def setUpClass(self):
        if sys.platform == 'nt':
            options = WindowsOptions()
            options.app = 'KDEe.V.Filelight\_7vt06qxq7ptv8!KDEe.V.Filelight'
        else:
            options = AppiumOptions()
            options.set\_capability('app', 'org.kde.filelight.desktop')

Putting it all together we get our final test which runs on both Linux and Windows.

\# Windows
# start appium in a terminal
python .\\test.py

# Linux selenium-webdriver-at-spi-run ./test.py

The complete test code:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT

SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2023 Harald Sitter sitter@kde.org

import unittest import sys from appium import webdriver from appium.options.windows import WindowsOptions from appium.options.common import AppiumOptions from appium.webdriver.common.appiumby import AppiumBy from selenium.webdriver.support.wait import WebDriverWait from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

class SimpleCalculatorTests(unittest.TestCase):

@classmethod
def setUpClass(self):
    if sys.platform == 'nt':
        options = WindowsOptions()
        options.app = 'KDEe.V.Filelight\_7vt06qxq7ptv8!KDEe.V.Filelight'
    else:
        options = AppiumOptions()
        options.set\_capability('app', 'org.kde.filelight.desktop')

    self.driver = webdriver.Remote(
        command\_executor='http://127.0.0.1:4723',
        options=options)

@classmethod
def tearDownClass(self):
    self.driver.quit()

def test\_scan(self):
    self.driver.find\_element(by=AppiumBy.NAME, value="Scan Home Folder").click()
    overview = WebDriverWait(self.driver, 120).until(
        EC.element\_to\_be\_clickable((AppiumBy.NAME, "Go to Overview"))
    )
    overview.click()
    WebDriverWait(self.driver, 4).until(
        EC.element\_to\_be\_clickable((AppiumBy.NAME, "Scan Home Folder"))
    )

if __name__ == ‘__main__’: unittest.main()

Discuss this blog post on [KDE Discuss](https://discuss.kde.org/t/writing-selenium-appium-tests-on-windows/3145).