A few little tweaks to automate Android instrumentation testing via Robotium & Maven

Having recently revived an android project I haven’t opened in close to 6 months, I was left scratching my head as to why I couldn’t run any of my integration tests.

Thinking back, I remembered having problems getting robotium to instrument the clicking of a button, as simple as it sounds, theres a few little gotchas involved. Firstly, I needed to modify the test code to click on text, rather than a button, as it has been suggested by various users on StackOverflow that there does tend to be odd side effects when clicking buttons:

public void testClickGetSurveyTakesToSurveyRunner() {
 solo.clickOnText("Get Survey");
 solo.assertCurrentActivity("Current activity was not correct", SurveyRunner.class);
 }

Next, I needed to add this into the test projects AndroidManifest

<uses-sdk android:targetSdkVersion="10" />

And then to add this into the main projects AndroidManifest:

<supports-screens android:anyDensity="true"/> 

Both of these tweaks are mentioned on the Robotium FAQ, so it might be worth glancing there to see if any enhancements get made in the future

After making those changes, I stumbled into another error that reared its ugly head in the logcat:

ERROR/AndroidRuntime(1185): FATAL EXCEPTION: main
 java.lang.IllegalAccessError: Class ref in pre-verified class resolved to unexpected implementation
 at com.roosearch.android.activity.SurveyRunner.onResume(SurveyRunner.java:38)
 at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnResume(Instrumentation.java:1150)
 at android.app.Activity.performResume(Activity.java:3832)
 at android.app.ActivityThread.performResumeActivity(ActivityThread.java:2110)
 at android.app.ActivityThread.handleResumeActivity(ActivityThread.java:2135)
 at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1668)
 at android.app.ActivityThread.access$1500(ActivityThread.java:117)
 at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:931)
 at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99)
 at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:130)
 at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:3683)
 at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method)
 at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:507)
 at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:839)
 at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:597)
 at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method)

There seems to be a rather peculiar requirement, that any dependencies your using on your main application, also need to be in the test projects pom.xml, but marked with a scope of provided. After making that change as advised here and rebuilding, both the app and instrumentation app build and test successfully.

I was also pleasantly surprised that I could run the instrumentation tests via IntelliJ IDEA 12 Ultimate, last time I tried that (on an older version albeit), it wasn’t so simple…