Windows 10: CodedUI to WinAppDriver/Appium - automated conversion

BorislavSK · Mar 30, 2022

As CodedUI is deprecated, we'd need to move our CodedUI scripts Visual Studio C# to WinAppDriver/Appium. To recode it would be a major effort. Is there a tool to convert CodedUI scripts to WinAppdriver/Appium?Thank you, Boris

:)

Brink · Mar 30, 2022

Windows Application Driver for PC integrates with Appium

The most time consuming and expensive part of developing an app is often the testing phase. Manually testing an app on hundreds of different devices is impractical, and existing automation solutions run into a number of platform and tooling limitations. Appium is designed to simplify testing by supporting multiple platforms, and it’s our goal at Microsoft with Windows Application Driver (WinAppDriver) to enable you to use Appium to test Windows apps. The recent release of Appium v1.6 integrates WinAppDriver so developers can run tests targeting Windows 10 PC applications through Appium!

What is WinAppDriver?

WinAppDriver is a modern, standards-based UI test automation service that aligns with the Selenium WebDriver Protocol The Windows Application Driver allows a developer to use the “write a test once, run anywhere” approach. No longer forced to choose a specific test language and runner, developers are granted flexibility and no longer need to rewrite tests for each platform.

What is Selenium/Appium?

Selenium is the industry standard for automated UI testing of websites/browser applications. Selenium works off of the WebDriver protocol, which is an open API for browser automation. Realizing that this same protocol could be leveraged for mobile app UI testing, the Appium project was created, and it extended the WebDriver API to allow for app-specific automation endpoints. WinAppDriver was created in the spirit of the Selenium/Appium projects to conform to the industry standards for UI testing and bring those standards to the Universal Windows Platform.

How it works

With Appium’s integration of WinAppDriver, developers will have full customization of their preferred testing language and test runner as shown in the diagram above—and they can reuse their tests if their app is on iOS and Android. It is only through Appium that developers can have this customization – each UWP developer might prefer a different test script/test runner for their UI tests and because Appium uses the Webdriver protocol, developers can have that flexibility when authoring tests.

What about CodedUI?

The current UI test automation solution for Windows app testing is CodedUI; however, Coded UI only works for apps running on the Windows platform. For developers who write cross-platform apps, this means they have to write tests for each platform they are targeting. Additionally, those developers who write cross-platform apps will have to write custom tests for each platform they are targeting.

With Appium supporting multiple platforms like Android and iOS, Microsoft encourages customers to use Selenium and Appium for Functional UI testing.

How can I get started?

To download Appium with Windows 10 PC support, make sure you have Node version >=6.0 and npm version >=3.5. Then use the following steps:

In your command prompt, run npm install –g appium

Then, run the command appium from an elevated command prompt

Make sure developer mode is on as well

Choose a test runner (Visual Studio, IntelliJ, Sublime Text etc.) and a language to test in (C#, Ruby, Python, etc.)

Create a test targeting a Windows application of your choice.

Set the URL targeting your Appium server, and the appId capability set to the app ID of the app you are testing.

The platformName capability should be set to “Windows” and the deviceName capability set to “WindowsPC” in the test script.

Run your test from the test runner targeting the Appium server URL

Here is a screenshot of what the install process looks like from the command line:

As part of the install, you should see that WinAppDriver is downloaded and successfully installed:

Then, just run Appium from the command line:

Now that the Appium server is running, you can run a test from your choice of test runner pointing to the Appium endpoint. In this example, we’ll use a test targeting the built-in Calculator app on Windows 10.

The key components (shown in the red boxes) are setting the URL to target the Appium server, as well as setting the app ID, platformName and deviceName as explained in the earlier instructions.

Once you run the test, you should see results in the test runner.

To see sample tests, check out the sample apps/tests on the WinAppDriver Github page or in the Appium samples repo. For more information about WinAppDriver + Appium, visit Appium’s website or their GitHub, or check out these videos talking about how Appium and UI test automation works.

Panel with Jonathan Lipps from SauceLabs

UI Test Automation for Browsers and Apps Using the WebDriver Standard
Click to expand...

Source: Windows Application Driver for PC integrates with Appium | Building Apps for Windows

Brink · Mar 30, 2022

Introducing WinAppDriver UI Recorder

A new open-sourced tool is now available for the Windows Application Driver (WinAppDriver) community: the WinAppDriver UI Recorder tool. This tool will enable users to easily create automated UI tests.

For those of you not familiar with WinAppDriver, it is a UI automation service for Windows 10 that users can use to test their applications. We recently released our v1.1 preview that you can read more about here.

What is UI Recorder

For many in the WinAppDriver community, Inspect has been the most common tool for users to select UI elements and view their attribute data. Though Inspect serves its intended purpose of viewing accessibility data, it falls behind when it comes to supporting scenarios specifically for UI automation, such as being able to generate XPath queries.

For situations such as these, the WinAppDriver UI Recorder tool hopes to fill in the gaps from Inspect and serve as its alternative.

As for its initial release, the UI Recorder tool will enable the following two key scenarios:

1) Inspecting UI elements and retrieving their XPath expressions

2) Generating C# code for certain actions (mouse click) when “Record” is active

Generated Code can be pasted into the UI Recorder Template folder for WinAppDriver playback

We’re hoping that with this tool, users will have a simpler and more intuitive approach in writing automation scripts for WinAppDriver.

Getting Started

The code for the UI Recorder is open-sourced and available on WinAppDriver’s GitHub repo here. It’s recommended to use Visual Studio 2017 to start building and compiling it. Once compiled, you can immediately start using UI Recorder.

In addition to access to the source, a zipped executable can be found here on our GitHub Releases section.

Using UI Recorder

The UI Recorder tool aims to provide an intuitive, and simplistic, user interface that is divided into two panels, as seen below:

UI Recorder tracks both keyboard and mouse interactions against an application interface—representing a UI action. When Recording is active, both the top and bottom panels are dynamically updated with varying UI element information every time a new UI action takes place. The Top Panel shows the generated XPath query of the currently selected UI element, and the Bottom Panel shows the raw XML information for the same element. You can navigate to the C# Code tab on the bottom panel to view generated C# code of the recorded action which you can use on a WinAppDriver test.

The following animation provides an example of the recording process:

The code recorded can be coped over to the clipboard and pasted onto the WinAppDriver UI Recorder template project to be replayed.

Providing Feedback

With the UI Recorder tool being open-source, we highly encourage the community to submit any PRs with changes or enhancements, and to post suggestions on how they would like to see the UI Recorder grow.
Please use the GitHub Issues Board to provide any feedback on the UI Recorder tool – we look forward to hearing about any suggestions, feature requests, or bug reports!

Staying Informed

To stay up to date with WinAppDriver news follow @mrhassanuz.

Summary

A new tool for WinAppDriver is available now: UI Recorder. Now users have an intuitive way automate UI with WinAppDriver by not only being able to generate XPath expressions on the fly, but also C# code from by recording UI action events through mouse clicks.
Click to expand...

Source: Introducing WinAppDriver UI Recorder - Windows Developer Blog

Tenforo · Mar 30, 2022

Introducing WinAppDriver UI Recorder

A new open-sourced tool is now available for the Windows Application Driver (WinAppDriver) community: the WinAppDriver UI Recorder tool. This tool will enable users to easily create automated UI tests.

For those of you not familiar with WinAppDriver, it is a UI automation service for Windows 10 that users can use to test their applications. We recently released our v1.1 preview that you can read more about here.

What is UI Recorder

For many in the WinAppDriver community, Inspect has been the most common tool for users to select UI elements and view their attribute data. Though Inspect serves its intended purpose of viewing accessibility data, it falls behind when it comes to supporting scenarios specifically for UI automation, such as being able to generate XPath queries.

For situations such as these, the WinAppDriver UI Recorder tool hopes to fill in the gaps from Inspect and serve as its alternative.

As for its initial release, the UI Recorder tool will enable the following two key scenarios:

1) Inspecting UI elements and retrieving their XPath expressions

2) Generating C# code for certain actions (mouse click) when “Record” is active

Generated Code can be pasted into the UI Recorder Template folder for WinAppDriver playback

We’re hoping that with this tool, users will have a simpler and more intuitive approach in writing automation scripts for WinAppDriver.

Getting Started

The code for the UI Recorder is open-sourced and available on WinAppDriver’s GitHub repo here. It’s recommended to use Visual Studio 2017 to start building and compiling it. Once compiled, you can immediately start using UI Recorder.

In addition to access to the source, a zipped executable can be found here on our GitHub Releases section.

Using UI Recorder

The UI Recorder tool aims to provide an intuitive, and simplistic, user interface that is divided into two panels, as seen below:

UI Recorder tracks both keyboard and mouse interactions against an application interface—representing a UI action. When Recording is active, both the top and bottom panels are dynamically updated with varying UI element information every time a new UI action takes place. The Top Panel shows the generated XPath query of the currently selected UI element, and the Bottom Panel shows the raw XML information for the same element. You can navigate to the C# Code tab on the bottom panel to view generated C# code of the recorded action which you can use on a WinAppDriver test.

The following animation provides an example of the recording process:

The code recorded can be coped over to the clipboard and pasted onto the WinAppDriver UI Recorder template project to be replayed.

Providing Feedback

With the UI Recorder tool being open-source, we highly encourage the community to submit any PRs with changes or enhancements, and to post suggestions on how they would like to see the UI Recorder grow.
Please use the GitHub Issues Board to provide any feedback on the UI Recorder tool – we look forward to hearing about any suggestions, feature requests, or bug reports!

Staying Informed

To stay up to date with WinAppDriver news follow @mrhassanuz.

Summary

A new tool for WinAppDriver is available now: UI Recorder. Now users have an intuitive way automate UI with WinAppDriver by not only being able to generate XPath expressions on the fly, but also C# code from by recording UI action events through mouse clicks.
Click to expand...

Source: Introducing WinAppDriver UI Recorder - Windows Developer Blog

Windows 10: CodedUI to WinAppDriver/Appium - automated conversion

CodedUI to WinAppDriver/Appium - automated conversion

CodedUI to WinAppDriver/Appium - automated conversion

CodedUI to WinAppDriver/Appium - automated conversion

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Windows Application Driver for PC integrates with Appium