Dependency issues and "blank screens" Appium

[iantimmis]

Operating System: MacOS

Issue: I cd'd into my "applications/appium/contents/.../app" directory and npm installed test-ai-classifier. After trying to start up appium, it resulted in an error "cannot find module prop-types". I then had to install prop-types. Appium crashed again warning that it could not find module uuid. This happened again for the lodash, bluebird, xpath, appium-support, request-promise, moment packages. After Appium finally didn't crash on startup because of missing modules, it started up and the screen was blank. I wait a while and nothing ever appears.

[jlipps]

Hmm, I am not sure if this plugin will work in the context of an electron app. Can you install the plugin globally instead? And delete Appium Desktop and try again?

[iantimmis]

I reinstalled Appium, and installed test-ai-classifier globally with npm. I started an Appium session with the following capability set:
{
"app": "/.apk",
"platformName": "android",
"deviceName": ":5555",
"customFindModules": {
"ai": "test-ai-classifier"
}
}

This will launch the android app on the emulator and start up Appium. But when I click the "search for element" button, there is no sign of --custom or anything relating to test-ai-classifier in the locator strategy.

Versions:

• test-ai-classifier@2.1.1
• Appium version 1.13.0
• Genymotion version 3.0.2

[jlipps]

Unfortunately this is expected. There's no specific support for the -custom locator strategy within Appium Desktop. You'll need to write and execute script files in order to access it.

[itimmisriis]

Thanks for the help. Do you have any examples / resources for how to do this? (for android specifically)

[jlipps]

I wrote a blog post about how to set it up. The post uses iOS but it works the same for android. https://appiumpro.com/editions/39