Executing Tests on another pc : AutomationId and XPath not found

[JulesCharlet]

Hi, I developped some winAppDriver tests for a UWP application, using Visual Studio and NUnit. They work fine on my machine, but my purpose is to provide them to a team of testers, executable without visual studio. For that I use NUnit GUI, TestCentric, allowing to load the tests outside of the visual studio perspective, and execute them.

After setting up the solution on a tester machine, the tests work partially : Loading the app work, finding an element by name or classname (and clicking it) work, but finding an element by accessibilityId or XPath doesn't (throwing "System.InvalidOperationException : An element could not be located on the page using the given search parameters")

I guess he's missing something for it to work properly, but I don't know what.

• WinAppDriver is installed and running when we execute the tests.
• TestCentric is installed and used to execute them
• .Net Framework 4.5 is installed. Tests would not load without it.
• All the needed DLL of the test project are available in the same folder as the main one. If one DLL is missing, Tests would throw a different, explicit error.
• The tester is in Developper Mode on his machine.
• Windows SDK is installed. It also allowed to check the app with inspect : AutomationIds appear like they should (but the tests still doesn't work).

Do you have an idea of what could explain this behavior, and how to fix it ?

Thanks

[hassanuz]

This sounds like it could be WinAppDriver not having enough time to find the element in question. Can you try adding a 20 second Thread.Sleep timer (I know, not ideal) on the suspect test cases to see if this resolves it?

If the XPath is absolute from the reference of a root / desktop session, then I wouldn't expect it to work anyhow since desktop elements and attributes are different from PC to PC. Though AutomationID should still work assuming the app is the exact same version with the AutomationIDs coded in.

[JulesCharlet]

Thanks for your answer. In my tests, for almost each interaction with an element, I have a WebDriverWait adding a dynamic wait before interacting. It is set to 1 sec (maybe it's not enough ?), and can be called twice, due to the way I made it :

try { _wait.Until(ExpectedConditions.ElementIsVisible(element)); } catch(WebDriverTimeoutException) { _wait.Until(ExpectedConditions.ElementExists(element)); }

Also, in the basic tests I made to determine what was working and what wasn't, It seemed like the test was failing instantaneously (maybe it seemed that way because the 1 second time is too short ?)

I'll test your solution and come back to share the results, but I can't do it now, so it will be some days/week later.

[JulesCharlet]

Also about XPath, I only use relative XPath in my tests. Here it was "//*[@Name='NameOfTheElement']"

[JulesCharlet]

Hi,

Firstly, I tested @hassanuz solution, to add a 20 second Thread.Sleep(). It didn't work, so instead of adding fix waiting time at the beginning of the test, I changed my WebDriverWait so it can wait up to 10 seconds instead of 1. Again, it didn't work, and that time it was clear that the test failed instantaneously, not waiting for the 10 seconds (not even 1).

Secondly, I was able to test it on another tester's computer, on which actually I've installed the solution before (but he never used it, and then was unavailable for some time). On his machine, where Visual studio is not installed either, the tests work well.

I'm still thinking it's a build issue, and that he his missing something on his computer (that the other tester would have) but I have still no idea what it could be. It could also be due to differents PC configs, but after the last tries I've made I think it is quite unlikely, isn't it ?

Thanks again