how can I improve iPhone UI Automation?

I was googling a lot in order to find a solution for my problems with UI Automation. I found a post that nice summarizes the issues:

There's no way to run tests from the command line.(...)

There's no way to set up or reset state. (...)

Part of the previous problem is that UI Automation has no concept of discrete tests. (...)

There's no way to programmatically retrieve the results of the test run. (...)

source: https://content.pivotal.io/blog/iphone-ui-automation-tests-a-decent-start

Problem no. 3 can be solved with jasmine (https://github.com/pivotal/jasmine-iphone)

How about other problems? Have there been any improvem开发者_StackOverflowents introduced since that post (July 20, 2010)?

And one more problem: is it true that the only existing method for selecting a particular UI element is adding an accessibility label in the application source code?

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While UI Automation has improved since that post was made, the improvements that I've seen have all been related to reliability rather than new functionality.

He brings up good points about some of the issues with using UI Automation for more serious testing. If you read the comments later on, there's a significant amount of discussion about ways to address these issues.

The topic of running tests from the command line is discussed in this question, where a potential solution is hinted at in the Apple Developer Forums. I've not tried this myself.

You can export the results of a test after it is run, which you could parse offline.

Finally, in regards to your last question, you can address UI elements without assigning them an accessibility label. Many common UIKit controls are accessible by default, so you can already target them by name. Otherwise, you can pick out views from their location in the display hierarchy, like in the following example:

var tableView = mainWindow.tableViews()[0];

As always, if there's something missing from the UI Automation tool that is important to you, file an enhancement request so that it might find its way into the next version of the SDK.

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Have you tried IMAT? https://code.intuit.com/sf/sfmain/do/viewProject/projects.ginsu . It uses the native javascript sdk that Apple provides and can be triggered via command line or Instruments.

In response to each of your questions:

There's no way to run tests from the command line.(...)

Apple now provides this. With IMAT, you can kick off tests via command line or via Instruments. Before Apple provided the command line interface, we were using AppleScript to bring up Instruments and then kick off the tests - nasty.

There's no way to set up or reset state. (...)

Check out this state diagram: https://code.intuit.com/sf/wiki/do/viewPage/projects.ginsu/wiki/RecoveringFromTestFailures

Part of the previous problem is that UI Automation has no concept of discrete tests. (...)

Agreed. Both IMAT and tuneup.js (https://github.com/alexvollmer/tuneup_js#readme) allow for this.

There's no way to programmatically retrieve the results of the test run. (...)

Reading the trailing plist file is not trivial. IMAT provides a jUnit like report after a test run by reading the plist file and this is picked up by my CI Tool (Teamcity, Jenkins, CruiseControl)

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Check out http://lemonjar.com/blog/?p=69 It talks about how to run UIA from the command line

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Try to check the element hierarchy, the table can be placed over a UIScrollView.

var tableV = mainWindowTarget.scrollViews()[0].tableViews()[0].scrollToElementWithName("Name of element inside the cell");

the above script will work even the element is in 12th cell(but the name should be exactly the same as mentioned inside the cell)