Server 'Settings' released in master

News
1

We’ve added the concept of ‘Settings’ to the Appium server.

Settings are a new concept introduced by appium. They are currently not a part of the Mobile JSON Wire Protocol, or the Webdriver spec.

Settings are a way to specify the behavior of the appium server.

Settings are:

  • Mutable, they can be changed during a session
  • Only relevant during the session they are applied. They are reset for each new session.
  • Control the way the appium server behaves during test automation. They do not apply to controlling the app or device under test.

An example of a setting would be ignoreUnimportantViews for Android. Android can be set to ignore elements in the View Hierarchy which it deems irrelevant. Setting this can cause tests to run faster. A user who wants to access the ignored elements however, would want to disable ignoreUnimportantViews, and reenable it afterwards.

Another example of a use-case for settings would be telling appium to ignore elements which are not visible.

Settings are implemented via the following API endpoints:

POST /session/:sessionId/appium/settings

Expects a JSON hash of settings, where keys correspond to setting names, and values to the value of the setting.

{
  settings: {
   ignoreUnimportantViews : true  
  }  
}

GET /session/:sessionId/appium/settings

Returns a JSON hash of all the currently specified settings.

{
  settings: {
   ignoreUnimportantViews : true  
  }  
}

The only actual setting we’ve added so far is :

“ignoreUnimportantViews” - Boolean which sets whether Android devices should use setCompressedLayoutHeirarchy() which ignores all views which are marked IMPORTANT_FOR_ACCESSIBILITY_NO or IMPORTANT_FOR_ACCESSIBILITY_AUTO (and have been deemed not important by the system), in an attempt to make things less confusing or faster.

The above is copied from the docs, which live here:

https://github.com/appium/appium/blob/master/docs%2Fen%2Fadvanced-concepts%2Fsettings.md

2

This has been reverted until some conversations are completed. I expect it to be back soon.

3

How to use settings in the Script using java bindings

4

The settings API has to exist before the bindings can support it.

5

It’ll be added to the java bindings after the feature gets merged into master. Will be pretty simple, plus I’ll create helper-functions for toggling the specific settings.