Conditional Alert Dialogs in UI Tests Android Studio

Issue

When a user signs into my application, an alert dialog appears if it is their first time. Otherwise, it does not appear.

This makes it tricky when I am trying to write UI tests. Since the alert dialog appears conditionally, I cannot close it using: onView(withId(android.R.id.button1)).perform(click()) as I have seen suggested on other posts.

However, if it does appear and I do not close it within my test, the test is blocked from moving on (as it does not recognise any other view ids) and fails.

Does anyone have any recommendations about how I might handle this?

Thank you!

Solution

However, if it does appear and I do not close it within my test, the test is blocked from moving on (as it does not recognise any other view ids) and fails.

Does anyone have any recommendations about how I might handle this?

Whenever you write a test, you must ensure that the required conditions are in place to reliably and consistently run the test in question. This is the "arrange" portion of the Arrange, Act, Assert idiom.

Therefore, if you're testing a flow that involves the dialog, you must arrange the test to set up the condition under which that dialog shows.

If you're testing a flow that does not involve the dialog, you must arrange the test to set up the condition under which the dialog does not show.

You have not posted code so I have no idea what the "condition" for showing the dialog is, but basically you need to do something in your test that ensures that condition is false if you don't want the dialog or true if you do. Maybe this is setting a shared preference?

So for example, your test might look generally like this:

@Test
fun myAwesomeTest() {
    // Arrange - do something to ensure dialog does not show
    SomeHelperClass.setConditionToShowDialog(false)

    // Act - do actions knowing the dialog will not show
    onView(withId(R.id.awesomeId)).perform(click())

    // Assert
    onView(withId(R.id.duperId)).check(matches(isVisible()))
}

Again, without specifics of your code, it's hard to give more detail but hopefully that is enough to get you going.

Hope that helps!

Answered By - dominicoder