Appium Collecting all the text on any screen

Question

I am working on translation automation for an app (iOS and android appium version 1.7.0) . Meaning i am supposed to go through all the pages of the app then I am using gcloud api to identify the language.

I need help finding an effective way to collect all the text displayed on a certain screen.

Currently I am using this approch as in the code below :

1. I find all the elements on the page

2. I get the ones with Text attributes

   public void displayText()
   {
   
       System.out.println("i will display all the text and each of their languages");
   
       // I find all the elements on the page as such
       List<MobileElement> list = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//*"));
   
   
       assertTrue(list.size()>0) ;
   
       System.out.println(list.size());
   
       //foreach of the elements detected I determine the language
   
   
   
       for(int i=0;i<list.size();i++)
       { if (list.get(i).getText()!= null) {
           String SeenText = list.get(i).getText();
           System.out.println(SeenText);
   
           //Lang detection
   
       List<Detection> detections 
       =translate.detect(ImmutableList.of(list.get(0).getText()));
       System.out.println("Language(s) detected:");
       for (Detection detection : detections) {
       System.out.printf("\t%s\n", detection);}
   
   
       }}
   
   System.out.println(driver1.getPageSource());
   

However this is only working for pages with few elements. It takes so much time for content heavy paged that the appium session times out.

I have considered manually parsing the outcome of "driver.getPageSource())" But I am not sure if that is reliable.

Any ideas on a better and functional way to get all the text in a screen?

Thans!

Answer 1

Using findElements() to collect the whole UI as MobileElements can be a very heavy process as you've noticed, especially with XPath in use.

What I would suggest is that you explore what element class types typically (or hopefully only) contain any text contents in the app, and fetch all of those elements via driver.findElements(By.className(""));

On Android there's a good chance that all the text contents use TextViews: driver.findElements(By.className("android.widget.TextView"));

On iOS text contents are often found within XCUIElementTypeStaticText driver.findElements(By.className("XCUIElementTypeStaticText"));

driver.getPageSource() would be the last resort to keep your verification logic efficient. You would in that case send a single request to Appium server and immediately receive all the information you're looking for. Parsing XML isn't heavy to do locally, but does require a bit of effort to implement. To make the driver.getPageSource() call contents reliable, you should probably first assert that the page is fully loaded.