Understanding Appium Desired Capabilities and Session

In this post we will start our discussion on Appium Session and Appium desired capabilities

Appium sessions

In Appium all the commands (client commands) are executed in the context of a session. Clients initiate a session with a server in ways specific to each library, but they all end up sending a POST /session request to the server, with a JSON object called the desired capabilities object. At this point the server will start up the automation session and respond with a session ID which is used for sending further commands. Here is the complete video of the below discussion

Appium Desired capabilities?

Desired Capabilities are sent by the Client to Server via JSON Objects by requesting the automation session we need. These desired capabilities are found in the link below http://appium.io/slate/en/v1.2.0/?java#appium-server-capabilities

Appium server Capability

Some of the Appium Server Capability are listed below

automationName	Which automation engine to use	Appium (default) or Selendroid
platformName	Which mobile OS platform to use	iOS, Android, or FirefoxOS
platformVersion	Mobile OS version	e.g., 7.1, 4.4
deviceName	The kind of mobile device or emulator to use	iPhone Simulator, iPad Simulator, iPhone Retina 4-inch, Android Emulator, Galaxy S4, etc…

Android only capability

appActivity	Activity name for the Android activity you want to launch from your package	MainActivity, .Settings
appPackage	Java package of the Android app you want to run	com.example.android.myApp, com.android.settings
appWaitActivity	Activity name for the Android activity you want to wait for	SplashActivity
appWaitPackage	Java package of the Android app you want to wait for	com.example.android.myApp, com.android.settings
deviceReadyTimeout	Timeout in seconds while waiting for device to become ready	5
androidCoverage	Fully qualified instrumentation class. Passed to -w in adb shell am instrument -e coverage true -w	com.my.Pkg/com.my.Pkg.instrumentation.MyInstrumentation
enablePerformanceLogging	(Chrome and webview only) Enable Chromedriver’s performance logging (default false)	true, false
androidDeviceReadyTimeout	Timeout in seconds used to wait for a device to become ready after booting	e.g., 30
androidDeviceSocket	Devtools socket name. Needed only when tested app is a Chromium embedding browser. The socket is open by the browser and Chromedriver connects to it as a devtools client.	e.g., chrome_devtools_remote

Thanks for reading the post and watching the video !!! Please leave your comments and let me know if there is anything I should update in this post. Thanks, Karthik KK

3 Replies to “Understanding Appium Desired Capabilities and Session”

Vikas says:

December 8, 2015 at 4:57 pm

Hi,

I wanted to implement Appium like POM but every time i get nullpointer exception.
Can you please share some demo or running framwork.
It will be a career booster for me

Ram says:

May 9, 2017 at 12:23 pm

how can i check override session in setting in appium server, using java program.Please help me.

Brijesh Karia says:

February 5, 2019 at 2:17 pm

Hi,

Can we automate testing of web application running on chrome on windows 10 using Appium?
Most samples on internet are around testing applications on android/ mobile devices.