How to automatically test Widgets on Home screen?

Question

I am looking at ways to automate testing of an Android app widget. Part of the test is thus obviously to put the widget on the Home screen. I came up with a solution, but it's a bit too hackish for my taste so I wonder if there's any better way.

My requirement is for this to work on the emulator, using an external script. Right now I use a simple bash script, but the method I use should work with a monkeyrunner script too:

First I define a function to send keys to the emulator, as already indicated on SO:

function send() { ( nc -w 2 localhost 5554  <<EOL
event send $*
quit
EOL
) | grep -E -v "OK|KO|Android Console" ; }

and

function send_many() { for i in $* ; do send EV_KEY:$i:1 EV_KEY:$i:0 ; done ; }

The send() function is equivalent to calling MonkeyDevice.send(..., DOWN_AND_UP).

Now I can reliabily send a key sequence to open the menu, select Add (A key), go up twice and down once to select "Widget", select my widget (it happens to be the first one in the list), wait a second or two for the widget configuration UI to show up and select its install button in it:

$ send_many KEY_MENU KEY_A KEY_UP KEY_UP KEY_DOWN KEY_ENTER KEY_ENTER
$ sleep 2s
$ send_many KEY_UP KEY_RIGHT KEY_ENTER

Finally I wrap that all that in a script that iterates through a bunch of AVDs (e.g. "test_avd_N" where N is an API number from 3..12), closes any running emulator, opens a new one, wait for it to start and runs the test scripts. I prepare all the AVDs using snapshots and use the emulator -no-snapshot-save option to keep the snapshot intact between runs.

So overall it works but it's quite unsightly. I wonder what I could improve here.

ralf at android · Accepted Answer · 2011-08-14 06:13:17Z

Using a MonkeyRunner script will at least remove the clumsiness of that send function. One obvious issue in your key sequence is using 'A' as a shortcut for Add from the Home menu. That won't work if the emulated device is in a different language, which you're bound to test at some point.

Speaking of which, starting with API 9 or 10, there's a revamped CustomLocale.apk on the emulator that you can use to change the locale using a broadcast:

$ LOCALES=( $( aapt dump configurations "$APK "| sed -e 's/^.*lang=\(..\).*reg=\(..\).*/\1_\2/;s/_--//;s/--//' ) )
$ for LC in ${LOCALES[@]}; do
>   adb -e shell am broadcast -a com.android.intent.action.SET_LOCALE --es com.android.intent.extra.LOCALE $LC
> done

To check if your emulator supports this, check whether the CustomLocale apk has v2 in its package name:

$ adb shell pm list packages | grep customlocale

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