Annyce Davis

Helping you write beautiful code

Bash Scripting for Flutter Tests and Code Coverage Reports

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Do you have a development task that is mostly a series of commands? Do you have to perform that task on a regular basis? If so, a script might be just what you need. Over the years I’ve wanted to learn bash scripting several times. Yet there’s always something else that takes priority and my desire to script takes a back seat. Not any more!

I finally decided to start learning how to write bash scripts and I want to share it with you in case you’d like to do the same. At the bottom of this post, I’ve listed several resources that I’m using to help me on this journey. If you’re an Android developer, you can use Gradle to handle many automated tasks. If you want to learn about Gradle on Android or how to create a Gradle plugin, check out my course here.

On to the script. It does the following:

  • Runs the unit and widget tests for a Flutter application
  • Generates a code coverage report
  • Removes the unwanted files from the coverage output
  • Converts the coverage data to HTML
  • Opens the HTML page in your browser

I’m going to break down what each section of the script does so that you can start having fun creating your own scripts! (This post assumes you are already familiar with programming and related concepts.)

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Talk: Screen Robots UI Testing with Espresso

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Often when writing tests with Espresso you find a lot of onView, withId, perform calls scattered throughout your test methods. This takes away from the simplicity of the test, tends to be verbose and also litters resource ids everywhere. There’s got to be a better way, right? Yes, there is…Screen Robots. In this presentation you will learn how to take advantage of the Screen Robot abstraction technique.

It covers: UI Testing, Basic Espresso, and Screen Robots

Materials

 
If you would like to learn more about creating high quality Android applications, I encourage you to check out my video course and bite-sized video content on Caster.io.

Testing Tricks #5 – Using Screen Robots with Espresso

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In this presentation by a developer at Square: “Software Quality/Automation Testing”, he discussed how they take advantage of Robots to make it easier to update tests whenever UI elements change, as well as a few additional benefits. This is a very useful abstraction technique for when you’re writing large numbers of tests in Espresso. So let’s look at an example of using a Screen Robot to test a simple login flow.

Before Using a Screen Robot

So the above code is how you would typically make use of Espresso, where you have multiple calls to onView() and reference the resource ids directly in each test. Two main drawbacks of this approach is that 1) if you need to change the ids in the future you have to update multiple tests, and 2) it’s not very clear from first glance what you’re attempting to accomplish in a given test due to the Espresso calls. So now let’s look at the same example, this time using Screen Robots.

Notice how the test method is more succinct and more easily conveys what we are trying to do, namely login with a given username and password and then make sure that it was a success. This includes the code for our LoginScreenRobot. This allows us to have a thin abstraction layer over the Espresso calls by extending our base ScreenRobot class. Hope you found this short testing tip helpful!

Testing Tricks #2: Finding UI Views

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When you’re writing Espresso tests for your Android applications, you will often need to reference the resource id of a particular view in order to make your assertions. Instead of digging through code you can take advantage of the UIAutomatorViewer tool. It’s very simple to use and helps you to visualize the hierarchy of the views in your application. 


Here it is in action:

Espresso Test

@Test
public void clickOnDetailItemShouldDisplayPlayer() {
    onView(withId(R.id.container_list)).check(matches(isDisplayed()));
    onView(withId(R.id.browse_headers))
        .perform(pressKey(KeyEvent.KEYCODE_DPAD_RIGHT));

    onView(allOf(isDescendantOfA(
                     withRecyclerView(R.id.row_content).atPosition(0)),
           withId(R.id.info_field)))
              .perform(pressKey(KeyEvent.KEYCODE_DPAD_CENTER));

    onView(withId(R.id.wapo_player_view))
        .check(matches(isDisplayed()));
}
 
This test is for an AndroidTV application. It makes sure that the D-Pad navigation from the main header to the nested RecyclerView is functioning as expected. All of the ids for the views were found using uiautomatorviewer.


Hope you found this useful, until next time!