Dealing with the soft keyboard in a Robotium test

Recently I developed some unit tests (see my previous blog entry) by running them on an Android emulator with a tablet form factor. I ran them on the emulator instead of my physical tablet because the tests would eventually be executed on a Hudson continuous integration server. When I needed to update some of the test cases due to changes in the app, I ran them on my tablet, where they promptly failed.

The problem on the tablet was that the soft keyboard came into view and obscured the button that I wanted Robotium to press. It’s necessary to make these work on both tablets, where developers will run them, and on the emulator, where Hudson will run them.

After a brief search on the web, I learned of several options. One of them did not work at all for me. This was the suggestion to disable the keyboard thus:

solo.getEditText(index).setInputType(0);
solo.enterText(index, "value");

The other suggestion was to use the back method of Solo class to make the keyboard go away. I put this command into the tests like this (line 16):

public void testCreateConnectionWithOnlyUserAndPW()
	{
		solo.pressMenuItem(0); //Settings

		assertTrue("did not get PrefsActivity", solo.waitForActivity("PrefsActivity"));
		getInstrumentation().invokeMenuActionSync(solo.getCurrentActivity(), R.id.menu_add_account, 0);
		assertTrue("did not get AuthenticatorActivity", solo.waitForActivity("AuthenticatorActivity"));
		//check that we are on the view to add a connection...

		assertNotNull("did not get conn text", solo.getText("Add Connection"));

		solo.enterText(1, "bcidemo");//user id

		solo.enterText(2, "whatever");//password

		solo.goBack(); //close the softkeyboard

		solo.clickOnButton("Next");

		assertTrue("did not get URL error msg",solo.searchText("Server URL cannot be empty"));
		assertTrue("did not get desc error msg",solo.searchText("Description cannot be empty"));
		assertTrue("did not get format error msg",solo.searchText("Server URL format is not correct"));
	}

This solution worked fine when the tests ran on the tablet, but failed miserably when they ran on the emulator. Fix one, break one. By watching the emulator I realized that the soft keyboard never appeared.

I hadn’t specified the optional property of keyboard support when creating the emulator file because I hadn’t needed it. By editing the emulator file in the AVD Manager to add keyboard support, I got the keyboard to show up. Now the tests can dismiss the keyboard in both situations. It’s rather a shame to make something appear so you can get rid of it, but it’s a complicated world.

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