Unable to perform click operation on certain Elements, iOS 10 Automation with Appium 1.6.3

Support
1

We are working on automation of a iOS application and are facing some major issues. Below is the summary of the environment setup and the issues faced with the solutions tried so far.

Environment setup done:
• As per client requirement, we had to work with iOS 10 and XCode 8. For fulfilling the requirement we had to upgrade our current Mac OS from 10.11 to 10.12.2.
• To work with iOS 10, we had to upgrade Appium from 1.5.3 to the latest version, 1.6.3.

Problems Faced:
• In iOS 10, things have been moved from the original UIAutomation to XCUITest.
• The current application seems to be built on the old UIAutomation, the UI elements aren’t getting recognized by the new accessibility inspector.

Solutions Tried:
• We’ve tried performing click operations using x,y coordinates, but with no luck.
• We also tried writing relative xpaths, by getting the entire application hierarchy, but we’re still facing issues.

Appreciate a response from iOS automation experts, if any such challenges were faced and solutions that worked.

2

First off, x,y is a bad idea.

Can you provide an example of something that is failing? Also the language you wrote it in.

These examples work fine for my iOS testing, in C#
//click on home
driver.FindElement(By.Name(“Home”));
//clear textfield
driver.FindElement(By.ClassName(“XCUIElementTypeTextField”)).Clear();

3

@kcinman11358 The UIElement that I want to interact with is of type XCUIElementTypeOther. This element doesn’t have any attribute values so I don’t have any option but to use xPaths to identify the element.

4

May those elements are ‘invisble’ (visible=false)? I’m facing a similar issue since I’ve updated to 1.6 and XCUITest. The problem for me is that the DOM elements that has visible=false attribute can’t be extracted as WebElement, so I can’t perform any action on it.

My issue is documented at thead How to handle XCUITest 'visible' attribute? check it out may it’s the same cause.