Understanding basics of iOS uiautomation selector strategy for Appium - ios

Question

I am writing UI automation tests for an iOS native app using Appium and gradually realizing how most of the element locating strategies don't reliably work for iOS. Apart from XPath which randomly works, other options that I have are:
Accessibility ID (did not work for me)
name (not every element will have value for 'name' attribute)
class (makes sense when you are working with a list of elements)
iOS UiAutomation predicates (steep learning curve for beginners)
I have been trying to understand how to use iOS UiAutomation locator strategy and find elements using it but it's not working on Appium Inspector. I have referred to these documentations (Appium iOS Predicate reference, Apple UIAutomation reference) but I feel they cater to an advanced Appium user audience who have some knowledge on iOS development, not for beginners.
Currently the element hierarchy that I am trying to find element in is something like this:
My current automation setup is:
XCode 6.3.2
Appium 1.4.8
iOS 8.3
Appium Java Client 3.1.0
What will be the locator I can use to locate the highlighted element using UiAutomation predicate strategy? I have been trying a few options on the Appium Inspector like:
applications()[0].windows()[0].navigationBars()[0].textFields().withPredicate("value == 'Search eBay'")
.textFields().withPredicate("value == 'Search eBay'")
These did not work. What am I doing wrong here? Are there any other documentations which clearly explain iOS UiAutomation locators from ground-up? It will really help if someone can explain these basics.

Answer 1

I have never worked with Appium before but I have worked with UIAutomation in javascript.
You can probably find the element using:
....textFields().firstWithName("Search eBay")
Note that UIAuatomation uses UIAccessibility protocol. The value for UITextField is its accessibilityValue and that one will be equal to the searched text, not the placeholder. Once you type something to the field, you will be able to use value.
Of course, in your case grabbing the first text field would work too, as there is only one in the navigation bar.

Answer 2

Just use this .navigationsBars()["EBUH_whateverstring"].textfields()["Search eBay"].textfields()["Search eBay"].
Better way is to ask dev to add accessibility id in case the code is in Obj-C or accessibility identifier if the app code is in Swift. Otherwise if the passed on element value is dynamic then the test will fail in asserting or doing action upon this element.
Another failsafe method is using array values.
.navigationsBars()[0].textfields()[0].textfields()[0] --> Check the array values of your element is [0] or any other. U can use this appium app to get the array value from where it shows xpath value for the element. Or you can use XCode Instruments if you have access to the code to find the exact value as UIAutomation interprets it.

Answer 3

If you are trying to find elements in Appium you will have to write code to do so. Assuming you are using Java, which is what I am using for code, the way you locate these elements is through the driver, tables, and rows.
What do I mean by this? Each element has an XPath associated with it, so one way of doing this is saying
driver.findElementByXPath("xpath_string_here");
This can be very useful when trying to run assertions, for example. using the above code, let us say we want to assert that its name is valid. we can say:
AssertEquals(driver.findElementByXPath("xpath_string_here").getAttribute("name"), 'Practice Example");
When I mention tables and rows, I mean doing something like this:
MobileElement table = (MobileElement) driver.findElementByXPath("string here");
List<WebElement> rows = driver.findElementByClassName("Class name here");
What does this code do? it creates a variable of type MobileElement which will go through the xPath you want, and then the rows value will find elements of that class name present inside of that table view. So in the above image, I would stop at the XPath for the UIAWindow, and then tell my rows to find the elements using class name of "UIAButton" for example.
At this point it is a matter of a simple loop if you want to run some actions on them such as .click(); using their indexes using the .get(int i) method. So for example: rows.get(i).click();
Does this help you with your question?