React Native is a Javascript based framework used to build mobile applications. Building native apps from the same code and the ability to do it using Javascript have made it extremely popular. Apart from this, businesses are attracted to the fact that they can save a lot of money by adopting this framework for app development.
React Native applications are not completely native to their operating systems. Some aspects are native and others run on a web view. Appium understands the context on which parts are native and which aren’t. Adding to that, it allows for both types of components to be controlled using the Selenium WebDriver APIs.
1. Best Practices to Follow During App Development - To ensure that there is consistency when testing both Android and iOS versions of the application, it is a good practice to add both a testID as well as Accessibility Label attribute to every important component to be tested. React Native framework performs a lot of conversions to suit a particular OS. This also involves cases where the testID might not remain a component’s attribute.
2. Contexts in Appium for Hybrid Applications - When a tester is ready to start writing automation test cases, one of the first things they need to do is change the test’s context. As mentioned before, Appium automatically knows the native context from the web view contexts. Thus, when testing starts, one can fetch all the available contexts and select the one which they would want to test upon.
3. Automation Testing for hybrid Android and iOS apps - Though the test cases remain the same for Android and iOS, the setup varies for these two operating systems.
For testing Android applications, one can use the chrome driver that comes out of the box with Appium. This can be used for testing on emulators as well as on real devices.
4. Setting up Appium for React Native application -
There are 3 major steps that will help set up Appium on React Native applications:
-
Installing Appium on the application – the Yarn package manager can be used to install the appium package in the application and also verify the installation using the appium-doctor tool.
-
Setting up the test server – This is where the tester provides the parameters to run the server such as the port and host.
-
Set up the test and device configurations – This step focuses on providing the desired capabilities discussed earlier in the article.
You can use this automation tool which I recently came across called QAppAssure, it is a platform for mobile experience testing automation. It has an On-field and on-cloud devices availed testing, which helps the app owner understand both the sides of the coins that are the bug faced by the current users and also before release too. Integrated test management also makes it easy to use all Jira and CI/CD tools in one place and also reports all bugs from all the destinations with the support of Multiple Frameworks like Appium, Calabash, Espresso, UI Automator, XCUITest, are also supported.
