Sharing here an alternative way of UI testing for Avalonia

[alexandrehtrb]

Hello,

I want to share here an idea that I made for UI tests on Avalonia.
There are currently two ways for UI tests on Avalonia: Headless UI testing and Appium.

Although they are good, I believe that an alternative way could be better.
Headless UI testing does not run on a visible app and I really would like to see this kind of testing visually.
Appium seemed a little complicated for having to install drivers and run on a separate process.
I also wanted to run UI tests on Release builds, as close as possible to a production build, for more trustworthiness (especially with new NativeAOT compilation).

Because of this, I made a simple UI test framework. It is far from perfect, but it shows the general idea. I based it on Android Espresso.

The link for the repo is: https://github.com/alexandrehtrb/AvaloniaUITestExample

[grokys]

I'd be interesting in tracking the progress of any alternative to Appium for UI testing. Appium is pretty unstable on desktop, and since WinAppDriver has been abandoned by MS we're stuck on Appium 1.

[Mrxx99]

I recently tested FlaUI (https://github.com/FlaUI/FlaUI) which also worked with Avlonia (only did a very simple test for now). But only runs on Windows.

[rbarriuso]

I recently posted a question on S.O. related to this topic. Does anybody know how to do E2E testing of an Avalonia 11 app on Linux?

[alexandrehtrb]

I updated the code and it's a little better now

I recently posted a question on S.O. related to this topic. Does anybody know how to do E2E testing of an Avalonia 11 app on Linux?

The code I shared works for all platforms

[DamianSuess]

@alexandrehtrb That's a pretty neat project you got started there. Though it's been a while since the last update, do you have any plans on returning back to it?

Currently, I'm looking for a solutions for adding automated UI testing. Thus far, besides your solution i'm finding:

• https://github.com/VerifyTests/Verify.Avalonia
• https://github.com/IngvarX/Camelot - last update, Nov 2023

[maxkatz6]

Currently, I'm looking for a solutions for adding automated UI testing

You are looking too far :)

https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/concepts/headless/
https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.Samples/tree/main/src/Avalonia.Samples/Testing/TestableApp.Headless.XUnit

Camelot project used old version of headless, which required more setup work.

[DamianSuess]

You are looking too far :)

@maxkatz6 you're a good man, thank you! I'll give it a shot.
Ultimately, we want to automate some QA testing behaviors of the existing GUI built on Prism.Avalonia. I appreciate your quick feedback. That was a late-night response, hope you got your rest last night

[alexandrehtrb]

Hi @DamianSuess , the project is pretty much finished, if you are interested in more examples, I use the same framework in another project of mine.

This UI test framework I shared here is visual, it allows you to see the test running with the UI being updated. It is based on Android Espresso.

Headless testing, mentioned by @maxkatz6 , runs faster and the tests can run in parallel; however, you can't see the UI being updated, which is something I like in UI testing. This framework is like Robolectric for Android.