Controlling instrumentation

Those who are familiar with test frameworks could have felt something missing after the previous instrumentation example. The test did not finish very elegantly, both the test launcher and the test program were terminated and the results should be fished out from the logs. The reason is that when the instrumentation finishes, it terminates the entire application, not just the activity that was instrumented. Although application as a notion exists since the beginning of Android's public life, developers usually concentrate on Activities. Application is a bunch of artifacts packed into one apk file, having one manifest file, running in the same JVM slice (seemingly independent JVM simulated for each application by the Dalvik virtual machine), represented by the same Application object. Instrumentation works on application level (as opposed to activity level) and when an instrumentation is finished, the entire application is terminated. That's why our instrumentation launcher did not survive the end of instrumentation - as it lived in the same application, it was also terminated along with the instrumentation object and the target application.

If we want to build a decent automated test framework, we have to control it from a separate application. This example does just that.

You can download the example program from here.

In the package, you will find two application directories. The instrumentation1 directory contains our friends, the slightly modified calculator test target, the instrumentation object and the instrumentation launcher that we will not use now. The instrcontroller directory contains a separate application, our instrumentation controller that starts the instrumentation and receives the test result. Like this:


The only interesting part is the communication between the instrumentation object and the launcher. The instrumentation object has a finish() method that is seemingly capable of sending back a result Bundle to the instrumentation's starter but I was not able to figure out, how that bundle is received by the instrumentation's starter (my Android newsgroup thread also remained unanswered). Therefore I had no better idea than to create a not too elegant do-it-yourself method of sending back the test result using broadcast intents. If anyone knows how to do it right, please notify me.

And before I finish, something completely different.

I received a mail from the Phoload people that they launched their Android content and they asked me to advertise this fact in one of my posts. Certainly, it is a new market, there is a lot of risk taking here so the early birds definitely deserve help - however small mine can be. I did have my concerns, however, how this Phoload site would coexist e.g. with Android Marketplace but the Phoload people are convinced that they can carve out a nice piece of market by offering mobile applications for multiple platforms and by providing easier navigation and more visible place for applications. Let they be right and have success!