Testing Notifications in Android

Question

My android app has a service which sends notifications to user based on parameters like number of runs of the app. The notifications are sent at different times in different situations. I want to test whether notifications are sent at the right times in all the different cases. Does android provide a way of such a testing ?

Solution 1

Testing Notification using UIAutomator:

Just go through the below code. It will help you in testing the notification.

UiDevice device = UiDevice.getInstance(InstrumentationRegistry.getInstrumentation());
device.openNotification();
device.wait(Until.hasObject(By.text(NOTIFICATION_TITLE)), TIMEOUT);
UiObject2 title = device.findObject(By.text(NOTIFICATION_TITLE));
UiObject2 text = device.findObject(By.text(NOTIFICATION_TEXT));
assertEquals(NOTIFICATION_TITLE, title.getText());
assertEquals(NOTIFICATION_TEXT, text.getText());
title.click();
device.wait(Until.hasObject(By.text(ESPRESSO.getName())), TIMEOUT);

Don't forget to add the UIAutomator dependencies in build.gradle.

// UIAutomator dependency
androidTestCompile 'com.android.support.test.uiautomator:uiautomator-v18:2.1.1' 

Solution 2

Please read this article

http://qathread.blogspot.com/2015/05/espresso-uiautomator-perfect-tandem.html

Here is a nice explanation of this topic:

Espresso for Android is perfect and fast test automation framework, but it has one important limitation - you are allowed to operate only inside your app under test context.

This means, it is not possible to automate tests for app features such as:

• application push notifications
• contact synchronization
• navigating from another app to your app under test,

Since you have to deal with other apps from the mobile device - NotificationBar, Contacts or People app, etc.

In fact it wasn't possible until the release of UIAutomator 2.0. As stated in Android Developers blog post - "...Most importantly, UI Automator is now based on Android Instrumentation...". And because of that we can run UIAutomator tests as well as Espresso tests using Instrumentation test runner.

In addition to that we can combine UIAutomator tests together with Espresso tests and this gives us the real power and control over the phone and application under test.

Comments

[Nicolás Straub]

posted by @dcr24 I don't have enough reputation to comment yet. Prem Choudhary's answer is pretty ingenious but it's important to note this only works on the premise that the device is unlocked, otherwise device.openNotification() will not work for the lock screen.