How does UIAutomation determine whether a UIAElement.isVisible() - ios

Question

I have a view with the following structure:
GrandView
-Parent View1
-Parent View2
--Child View1
--Child View2
The child views take up almost all of the bounds of Parent View2, but there is still some space around the edges. I can select Parent View2 in the simulator with the accessibility inspector if I click on the edges. I can also tap Parent View2 in UIAutomation if I use:
tapWithOptions({tapOffset:{x:0.15, y:0.95}});
However, my calls to isVisible() always return 0. I expect that if I can tap the element, or select it with the accessibility inspector, it should return 1.
How does UIAutomation determine whether a UIAElement is visible?

Answer 1

Every operation you perform against an element has a timeout. This isn't obvious from the Apple documentation, but if you look at: setTimeout , it tells us:
The timeout value establishes a grace period for object resolution. If an object representing a UI element becomes available within the grace period, an attempt is made to instantiate that object from information retained by the instrument.
setTimeout itself just changes the default value (as do push and pop). What you really want to do is perform your action on your view, and fail on the timeout if it never becomes available (the default timeout is 5 seconds). The WWDC 2010 session "Automating User Interface Testing with Instruments" does go into this a little, it's available on the ADC WWDC 2010 page, with both video and slides. In your case, you'd want to execute the tap() on your view. If, for some reason, that view isn't available to UIAutomation within 5 seconds, you should see an exception. Experiment with changing the timeout by doing:
var oldTimeout = target.timeout();
target.pushTimeout(10);
before your code, and
target.popTimeout(oldTimeout);
after.

Answer 2

If it's a UIView, it should be driven the the hidden property. If it's not a view, and it's a container, it should be driven by accessibilityElementsHidden .
In general though, you don't want to use this for UIAutomation. Instead, whatever you were going to do on the view - in this case, a tap() - go ahead and do it, and let the system throw an error if it times out. In general this is the model you want to follow in your scripts rather than testing whether something is available first. Sine UIAutomation is DOM scripting the UIAccessibility information, when things like animated view transitions happen things get out of sync. Sometimes the script executes faster than the UI animates, and sometimes the opposite! waitForInvalid may be a shortcut to a solution for you.
Alex Vollmer's tuneup.js library for UIAutomation makes writing tests much easier, and is easy to extend.
https://github.com/alexvollmer/tuneup_js