Xamarin.UITest | Bas de Cort

When running your UI tests, locally or in Xamarin Test Cloud, you sometimes want to execute code in your app from your tests. You might for instance want to setup some mock implementations instead of making actual API calls, or you might want to trigger some OS specific code from your tests. In these scenario’s backdoors come in handy!

Backdoors itself are not very complex, but it opens up a lot of possibilities with UI tests. In the past I used backdoors to:

Setup authentication for tests
Create a specific state in your app to run your tests in.
Set mock implementations from my UI tests.
Trigger deeplink

And I can think of a lot more useful scenario’s. You can create a backdoor with the following code:

iOS
In your AppDelegate class you need to create an method that returns NSString, is public, is annotated with Export attribute and takes an NSString as parameter. For example:

public class AppDelegate : UIApplicationDelegate
{
 [Export("myBackdoorMethod:")] // notice the colon at the end of the method name
 public NSString MyBackdoorMethod(NSString value)
 {
 // In through the backdoor - do some work.
 }
}

Android
On Android you need to create a method in your MainActivity that is public, returns string/void, is annotated with Export attribute and takes an string/int/bool as parameter:

public class MainActivity : Activity
{
    [Export("MyBackdoorMethod")]
    public void MyBackdoorMethod(string value)
    {
        // In through the backdoor - do some work.
    }
}

Invoking the backdoor from your UI tests:

if (app is Xamarin.UITest.iOS.iOSApp)
{
    app.Invoke("myBackdoorMethod:", "exampleString");
}
else
{
    app.Invoke("MyBackdoorMethod", "exampleString");
}

Note: The signature of the backdoor methods is very important as the Backdoors – Xamarin docs mention.

If you want to switch out your actual implementations for mocks, the use of compiler flags (combined with build configurations) might be more suited. You can read more on this over here.

Related links:

Backdoors – Xamarin documentation: https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/testcloud/uitest/working-with/backdoors/
IApp.Invoke – Xamarin documentation: https://developer.xamarin.com/api/member/Xamarin.UITest.IApp.Invoke/p/System.String/System.Object/

If you have developed some Xamarin applications in the past, you might have stumbled on the excessive range of configuration options you can choose from. The settings you’re using in development may be very different from your Release settings. For example; you don’t want to include debug information in the app that will be published to the App Stores. It will increase the app size enormously and expose technical info about your app that might be useful to malicious people.

Besides the difference of Release and Debug configurations, you sometimes need a extra set of configurations. Visual Studio allows you to create additional build configurations:

Configuration Manager

Build configurations

Compiler flags / Conditional compilation symbols

Per build configuration you can also specify a set of compiler flags. Compiler flags on itself don’t have any impact on your app, but you can use these flags in your code. By default the build configuration called Debug, has a compiler flag called “Debug”. In your code you can check if this flag is set (and therefor Debug configuration is active) and execute some Debug code. A common scenario is to Log additional information when the Debug flag is set.