Android - Not Finding Element?

Support
1

Hi everyone,

I am having some trouble finding an element on the screen and generally I think the logs are telling me everything but sometimes I feel like I need a tutorial on deciphering them.
Based on the code snippet below, does this mean its not finding the element at all?

[debug] [AndroidBootstrap] Sending command to android: {“cmd”:“action”,“action”:“find”,“params”:{“strategy”:“xpath”,“selector”:“//android.widget.Button[@text=‘Log Me Out’]”,“context”:“”,“multiple”:true}}
[AndroidBootstrap] [BOOTSTRAP LOG] [debug] Got data from client: {“cmd”:“action”,“action”:“find”,“params”:{“strategy”:“xpath”,“selector”:“//android.widget.Button[@text=‘Log Me Out’]”,“context”:“”,“multiple”:true}}
[AndroidBootstrap] [BOOTSTRAP LOG] [debug] Got command of type ACTION
[AndroidBootstrap] [BOOTSTRAP LOG] [debug] Got command action: find
[AndroidBootstrap] [BOOTSTRAP LOG] [debug] Finding ‘//android.widget.Button[@text=‘Log Me Out’]’ using ‘XPATH’ with the contextId: ‘’ multiple: true
[AndroidBootstrap] [BOOTSTRAP LOG] [debug] Failed to locate element. Clearing Accessibility cache and retrying.
[AndroidBootstrap] [BOOTSTRAP LOG] [debug] Finding ‘//android.widget.Button[@text=‘Log Me Out’]’ using ‘XPATH’ with the contextId: ‘’ multiple: true
[AndroidBootstrap] [BOOTSTRAP LOG] [debug] Returning result: {“status”:0,“value”:}
[debug] [AndroidBootstrap] Received command result from bootstrap
[debug] [MJSONWP] Responding to client with driver.findElements() result:

Whats confusing here to me is if I have it print the elements text value, it is able to do so successfully so I am not sure how it could do that if its not finding the element.

Thx.

2

The last log output shows your findElements() returned an empty array. How are you printing the text of the elements value?

3

@brian-themaven I am using a simple println() statement to print the contents of what it finds.
It seems to be printing just 1 value fine.

I have been digging into this a bit more and it appears that because of the XML structure its taking a very very long time to search it for the element I am looking for. I had to up my timeout values for assertion considerably to figure this out.

    okButton(wait: true) { $(By.xpath("//android.widget.Button[@resource-id='com.test.leadcap:id/logOutButton']")) }

Not sure why it takes quite that long to search all the paths, I would estimate its taking around 10 min to find the element.

4

I’ve seen the long search times too. I’ve added this to the my android capabilities setCapability(‘compressXml’, ‘true’); It seems to help. Also I’ve found searching by classnames and ids seems to faster than xpath but sometimes still struggle to get them right.

5

@brian-themaven Do you happen to have an example of how exactly you are searching via classname and ids?
I have tried some combos of this but not much success.

I will also try implementing the compressXML capability and see if that helps.

6

Here’s a link that has some good examples.
http://toolsqa.com/mobile-automation/appium/findelement-and-findelements-commands/

7

Perfect. I will give that a look over.

Thx again for the help.