Windowns Application Driver

Windows Application Driver is a service to support Selenium-like UI Test Automation on Windows Applications. This service supports testing Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and Classic Windows (Win32) apps on Windows 10 PCs. Windows Application Driver complies to the JSON Wire Protocol standard and some application management functionalities defined by Appium. If you've been looking for better support for using Appium to test Windows Applications, then this service is for you!

Table of Contents

• System Requirements
• Installing and Running
• Other Locators
• References

System Requirements

• Windown 10
• Any Appium test runner

Installing and Running

You have two way to install it. If you have already installed the Appium then you do not need to install anymore!

1. Installing and Running Windows Application Driver

1. Download Windows Application Driver installer from https://github.com/Microsoft/WinAppDriver/releases
2. Run the installer on a Windows 10 machine where your application under test is installed and will be tested
3. Run WinAppDriver.exe from the installation directory (E.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Application Driver)

Windows Application Driver will then be running on the test machine listening to requests on the default IP address and port (127.0.0.1:4723). WinAppDriver.exe can be configured to listen to a different IP address and port as follows:

WinAppDriver.exe 4727
WinAppDriver.exe 10.0.0.10 4725
WinAppDriver.exe 10.0.0.10 4723/wd/hub

Note: You must run WinAppDriver.exe as administrator to listen to a different IP address and port.

2. Installing and Running Appium

Appium can be installed in one of two ways: via NPM or by downloading Appium Desktop, which is a graphical, desktop-based way to launch the Appium server.

Installation via NPM

First, make sure you installed Node in your enviroment, then type this command

$ npm install -g appium

One you open command prompt, you can simply run command $ appium --session-override

Installation via Desktop App Download

Simply download the latest version of Appium Desktop from the releases page and then run it.

Note: Windows Application Driver is integrated with Appium, meaning if you use Appium as part of the test runner then it will launch WinAppDriver.exe and proxy the requests for you.

1. Appium will install Windows Application Driver for you on Windows if you don't already have it. Every release of Appium is linked to a specific release of WinAppDriver and will not proxy to a different version of WinAppDriver. The easiest way to manage this is to let Appium install WinAppDriver for you.
2. To create multiple sessions with one Appium server you need Appium 1.6.4 or newer
3. When pointing a test at Appium you need to include /wd/hub on the server URI. E.g. http://127.0.0.1:4723/wd/hub

Other Locators to Find UI Elements

Windows Application Driver supports various locators to find UI element in the application session. The table below shows all supported locator strategies with their corresponding UI element attributes shown in inspect.exe.

Client API	Locator Strategy	Matched Attribute in inspect.exe	Example
FindElementByAccessibilityId	accessibility id	AutomationId	AppNameTitle
FindElementByClassName	class name	ClassName	TextBlock
FindElementById	id	RuntimeId (decimal)	42.333896.3.1
FindElementByName	name	Name	Calculator
FindElementByTagName	tag name	LocalizedControlType (upper camel case)	Text
FindElementByXPath	xpath	Any	//Button[0]

References

• https://github.com/Microsoft/WinAppDriver
• https://appium.io/