IXONOS sponsored AndroidViewClient improvements

Thanks to IXONOS and its commitment with the Open Source community AndroidViewClient has reached a new level of maturity. IXONOS has sponsored the improvement of some core AndroidViewClient features broaden its usage and allowing it to be used as a test workhorse of many other projects.

Ari Manninen, from IXONOS said:

"AndroidViewClient is a very valuable tool for creating device independent MonkeyRunner scripts. It has greatly enhanced MonkeyRunner testing in our customer projects."

monkeyrunner: importing from PYTHONPATH

In previous post we analyzed what is needed to develop, run and debug monkeyrunner scripts using Eclipse and PyDev.

#! /usr/bin/env monkeyrunner
'''
Created on Sep 10, 2012

@author: diego
'''

import re
import sys
import os
import java

# This must be imported before MonkeyRunner and MonkeyDevice,
# otherwise the import fails.
# PyDev sets PYTHONPATH, use it
try:
    for p in os.environ['PYTHONPATH'].split(':'):
       if not p in sys.path:
          sys.path.append(p)
except:
    pass

try:
    sys.path.append(os.path.join(os.environ['ANDROID_VIEW_CLIENT_HOME'], 'src'))
except:
    pass

from com.dtmilano.android.viewclient import ViewClient, View
from com.android.monkeyrunner import MonkeyRunner, MonkeyDevice

# usage: script [serialno]
serialno = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else 'emulator-5554'
device = MonkeyRunner.waitForConnection(30, serialno)
try:
    device.wake()
except java.lang.NullPointerException, e:
    print "ERROR: Couldn't connect to %s: %s" % (serialno, e)

These are the lines you should add to every monkeyrunner script. Here you are a brief explanation of the snippet.

1. The shebang line to invoke monkeyrunner  interpreter if you are using Linux or Mac OS X. Unfortunately this is not available on Windows. Eclipse does not use this line but is needed if you want to simplify the way you are running the scripts from the command line.
2. Some standard imports
3. PyDev uses PYTHONPATH while monkeyrunner ignores it. This snippet adds the components present in PYTHONPATH to sys.path and makes them visible to monkeyrunner.
4. Following, we need to locate AndroidViewClient which you should have added to the environment. This can be also added in Eclipse in Run Configurations -> Environment.
   ANDROID_VIEW_CLIENT_HOME should point to your AndroidViewClient installation to the parent folder of src. That is, if you have downloaded AndroidViewClient in /opt/AndroidViewClient and kept the same structure as the distribution, you should set ANDROID_VIEW_CLIENT_HOME=/opt/AndroidViewClient/AndroidViewClient
5. The imports, which will now succeed because sys.path contains the right components
6. Gets the device's serial number from the command line or default to emulator-5554.
7. Connect to the device
8. Check if the connection was successful. Because MonkeyRunner.waitForConnection() returns a MonkeyDevice even when the connection fails we need to go to this extra step to verify it.