Appium Desktop Client UI Inspector- Beginners Tutorial

Video is an Appium tutorial for beginners.

Link to my Ebook on, "Appium WinAppDriver UI Automation Testing Windows Apps in C#"
Free pdf format download, book 1 of 8: https://astounding-leader-2666.ck.page/a44b59364b

These videos are from my premium Udemy course about test automation using Appium and WinAppDriver in C# .Net.
Using Appium Client For Object Inspection With WinAppDriver in Windows 10 Test Automation
Introduction to Appium Desktop Client
This video is going to show you just that because I believe it has the potential to make your life easier. I've also added the same videos to my Udemy course and YouTube channel. This tool is called the Appium Desktop.
You can download it from the Appium.io website.
Before we proceed, please remember there are two prerequisites for using Appium Desktop.
Enable Windows 10 Developer Mode on your PC
You need to have WinAppDriver 1.1 or above installed on your PC.
Please note that you don't need to install Node.js to run an Appium desktop client. Let me google the search term Appium Desktop client quickly and show you.
We are going to click the link titled "Appium desktop for OSX, Windows, and Linux".
appium WinAppDriver
This will take us to the GitHub repository of the Appium Desktop project. You will need to download the Appium-windows.exe from here and use it to install an Appium desktop.
Please see the screenshot below.
appium desktop
Once you've got Appium Desktop installed, you can proceed further. We are going to start using Appium Desktop for inspecting Windows Applications. Please note that you can use the same utility to check apps on other Appium supported platforms such as Android and iOS as well if you have proper tools installed. Although that's beyond the scope of this blog.
Running Appium Desktop Client and Connecting to a Windows Application
Before we proceed with using the Appium Desktop Client to inspect the elements of a Windows Application, please start the WinAppDriver.exe.
WinAppDriver
Now let's run the Appium Desktop Client, you'll be able to find it in your Windows applications. Click the "Start" button and type Appium.
The calculator app will start, and you'll get a preview inside the Appium UI inspector. You can hover the mouse on various controls of the application under test, and those controls will be highlighted in yellow. The mouse cursor is also changing into a hand in my case, but it was not captured in the screenshot.
Appium UI inspector
Let's end this section here, and we will learn more about the Appium UI Inspector
in the section below.
Inspecting Elements Using Appium Desktop Client and WinAppDriver For Automated Testing
Once we have created a session in Appium Client, we will be able to inspect various elements of the loaded application. The Appium Client object inspector UI is pretty simple. There's a row of the button on the top, "Select Elements" is clicked by default.
Appium Select Element
We have the application preview loaded on the left side.
“App Source” in the middle showing the hierarchy of application controls.
The rightmost panel is “Selected Element”, it will populate when we’ll click an element.
Selected Element
For Example, we will hover the mouse on the application preview shown in the Appium Desktop Client.
You will see that the element under the cursor will highlight yellow. Let's click on button two in the application preview. You see, its color will change. You'll see all attributes of this Windows Element will load in the right-hand side pane. I've highlighted some properties/attributes (Name, AutomationId), which we can use for automation in the screenshot below.
appium properties

Links to my full Udemy courses:

Azure DevOps Build Pipelines: Run Windows UI Automation & CI
https://www.udemy.com/course/windows-ui-automation-on-azure-devops-build-pipelines/?referralCode=31F4FCC272434D3B1C3C

Appium WinAppDriver UI Automation Testing Windows Apps in #
https://www.udemy.com/course/appium-winappdriver-automation-testing/?referralCode=ED22C3A4CE5BB5E22E53

Windows Service Programming, Debugging, Installing in #.Net
https://www.udemy.com/course/windows-service-programming/?referralCode=70021D1098369E53154F

UDP Socket Programming For Distributed Computing in C#.Net
https://www.udemy.com/course/udpsocketprogramming/?referralCode=9A39D0BAEBF79DBDE6A3

TCP/IP Socket Programming in C# .Net For Coders & Students
https://www.udemy.com/course/tcpip-socket-programming-for-coders-using-csharp-net/?referralCode=502BB75B8D0BEE51037E

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