Question

I have developed an android app on which i want to run the robotium test cases. The first problem i have is, In my app i am using so many web service calls to interact with the server, Whenever the app hits the server i am displaying a progress dialog, Now i want to make wait the robotium until the app get response from the server but i can make wait for some time using waitForDialogToClose(), Actually i want to make it wait exactly till it get some response or error from the server. How to do it..??

And the Second problem is i am doing some uploading data(eg. file or image) to server and i am displaying progress bar for it, In this case i want to make wait robotium until my progress bar reaches it max value. Please help..

Regards,
Ram.

Answer 1

Robotium is a black box testing framework : you test an app from the UI layer and it can even run without any knowledge of the code of the app under test.

For this reason, from robotium you can’t plug a listener in your model or rest client and wait till the response comes into your app. So, you have two options :

• relaying on the UI as you do, waiting for a given state to appear in the UI, as you suggested with a dialog, or the content of a list, whatever.
• wait for some time before continuing the test, a time at which you are pretty sure data will be there. But this is more risky and will fail more often.

Some unit tests would be nice to test your rest client (or equivalent), then if you could mock it and run your ui tests disconnected it would be nicer. But all this require a large amount of design work, worth it but complex for a small app and a beginner in java. Maybe you would be better testing only your UI and keeping in mind that your tests are not perfect.