Table of Contents
Overview
This is the tenth part of the complete Gestures guide in the Appium series. So far, we've covered all possible gestures in native mobile applications. But what if we want to perform gestures in mobile browsers like Chrome Mobile? This means doing actions on websites opened by mobile browsers. Or what if that page is in a WebView context (in a Hybrid App)?
Actually, it's the same as using Selenium, since we are automating a web page. The only difference is to use the AppiumBy class instead of the By class. Also, we need to pass the driver binary.
Set Chrome Driver's binary path
We know it's required to specify the browser's driver binary in Selenium. But after version 4.6, they introduced SeleniumManager. It combines all the older driver manager libraries and can download and set up the right driver automatically if we don't define where it is located.
For mobile web browsers in Appium, managing the driver file is also mandatory. We can either tell Appium where to find the driver binary file or let it download and automatically set the right version it needs for the browser. So, we have three ways to do this:
1.Let Appium download and handle the driver's binary automatically by passing a flag to the Appium server. To do this we should run the following command to start the server instead of a single appium command
appium server --allow-insecure chromedriver_autodownload
2.Manually download the driver binary from the official website and copy it to the following path on your system. (The win folder at the end indicates it's for Windows since I'm on Windows now; for Mac and Linux, the last directory will be mac and linux ):
/USER_HOME/.appium/node_modules/appium-uiautomator2-driver/node_modules/appium-chromedriver/chromedriver/win
Note that if you are using Chrome version under 115, you should download the driver binary from here.
3.Add "chromedriverExecutable: <DRIVER_PATH>" to desired caps appium options
desired_caps = {
"platformName": "Android",
"browserName": "Chrome",
"appium:options": {
"automationName": "UiAutomator2",
"chromedriverExecutable": "C:/chromedriver.exe" # This line
}
}
Drag and Drop on Chrome Mobile Browser
from appium import webdriver
from appium.webdriver.common.appiumby import AppiumBy
from appium.options.android import UiAutomator2Options
from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains
appium_server = "http://127.0.0.1:4723"
appium_options = UiAutomator2Options().load_capabilities(desired_caps.chrome)
driver = webdriver.Remote(appium_server, options=appium_options)
driver.get("https://selenium08.blogspot.com/2020/01/drag-drop.html")
el1 = driver.find_element(AppiumBy.CSS_SELECTOR, '#draggable')
el2 = driver.find_element(AppiumBy.CSS_SELECTOR, '#droppable')
actions = ActionChains(driver)
actions.w3c_actions.pointer_action.click_and_hold(el1)
actions.w3c_actions.pointer_action.pause(1)
actions.w3c_actions.pointer_action.move_to(el2)
actions.w3c_actions.pointer_action.release()
actions.perform()
First, we create an instance of the ActionChains class:
actions = ActionChains(driver)
Next, we define our gesture steps. We choose w3c_actions to build our W3C-compatible gesture, followed by the pointer_action property since our input is a Pointer (left/right click of mouse, or touch), not a Mouse Wheel or Keyboard. I explained this inputs in detail in Part 8. Ending with actions for each step.
actions.w3c_actions.pointer_action.click_and_hold(el1)
actions.w3c_actions.pointer_action.pause(1)
actions.w3c_actions.pointer_action.move_to(el2)
actions.w3c_actions.pointer_action.release()
And finally, we perform all defined actions to be executed:
actions.perform()
Thank you for taking the time to read! ❤️ 🙏
If you enjoyed the post, please leave your reactions, comments, and questions. I’d love to hear your feedback!
In the next article (which is the last one of this series), we will explore an interesting feature of Appium Inspector that is used to create mobile gestures!
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Happy testing ✌️
