WinAppDriver – Free Tool To Automate Windows Applications

 WinAppDriver

WinAppDriver (short for Windows Application Driver) is a free test automation tool for Windows desktop apps developed by Microsoft. It can run as a standalone as well as a plugin for Appium. Thus, if you are already running Appium’s server, then a request for Win10 app automation will launch WinAppDriver.exe, one of the fast-growing tools that will provide you with better support for using Appium to test Windows apps.

Appium is cross-platform it allows you to write tests against multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Windows), using the same API. This enables code reuse between iOS, Android, and Windows test suites



Supported Applications 

It is supported on machines running Windows 10 operating system (Home and Pro) and Windows Server 2016, and it supports all Windows applications based on:

Universal Windows Platform (UWP), Windows Forms (WinForms), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and Classic Windows (Win32) apps

Configurations

  1. Download Windows Application Driver installer from here
  2. Enable Developer Mode in Windows settings (shown in below image)
  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).  



Inspect a Windows UI Element

To start inspecting a windows UI element, we need the Windows kit which can be downloaded from here

The latest version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio includes the Windows SDK by default along with the Inspect tool to inspect the application under test. This tool shows every UI element/node which can be queried using the Windows Application Driver. 


The inspect.exe tool can be found under the Windows SDK folder which is typically

C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\10.0.19041.0\x64


In this example, I am inspecting the elements of the Alarms & Clock application



Note: An alternate of inspect.exe we can use the UiSpy from here - Download UiSpy


Writing the Script

With WinAppDriver you can use any of the following languages C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby In this example, I’ve to use Java with TestNG. Below is the code I used to launch the session to the Calculator application:

Note: Make sure the winappdriver.exe is running, once the connection is established you can see all the comminutions in winappdriver.exe console

@Test

public void launchCalculator() throws MalformedURLException {

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();

capabilities.setCapability("app","Microsoft.WindowsCalculator_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App");

capabilities.setCapability("platformName", "Windows");

capabilities.setCapability("deviceName", "WindowsPC");

CalculatorSession = new WindowsDriver(new URL("http://127.0.0.1:4723"), capabilities);

CalculatorSession.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10,TimeUnit.SECONDS);

}

Locators

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


Supported Capabilities

Below are the capabilities that can be used to create Windows Application Driver session


References

·         WinAppDriver GitHub - GitHub

·         Saravanan Seenivasan GitHub - Saravanan Seenivasan GitHub

·         Saravanan Seenivasan YouTube - YouTube

·         WinAppDriver With WDIO - WinAppDriver-WDIO


Thanks
Saravanan Seenivasan
QA Lead Engineer



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