UI Automation (IUIAutomationElement) and HTML Input controls?

Question

I have a test harness written in C# using CUIAutomation and IUIAutomationElements to perform UI Automation.

I am pointing this test harness at HTML interfaces (both in IE and in a Silverlight HTML container, although I don't think this is actually germane to the conversation).

A number of HTML Input controls (Type = Text) are present on the page, but my harness and inspect.exe both fail to detect a useable Name ID.  In hindsight, this matches the documentation available on MSDN, but that doco does not make a lot of sense.  At  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh452706.aspx is a listing of the mapping of HTML 4 controls to UIA. 

According  to that page, an Input control where Type = Text will always have a Name = "".  While this matches what I see in inspect, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  In other words, using the Name property to identify an on-screen input control is impossible, since there is no uniquely identifying property that can be used to distinguish one control from another. 

So, how is this intended to work?  I  am guessing I should be using an Automation ID instead, however, the  same controls exhibit not such property via inspect.exe.  Here is a sample of the HTML used to create the Input controls in question:

  
                     <input name="GeneralInfoPage$NameTextBox" type="text" maxlength="50" id="GeneralInfoPage_NameTextBox" class="detailText" style="width:50%;" />

As you can see, both a name and ID are provided in the mark-up.  Is there a tag that can be added to get a similar, unique value to be used as the Automation ID?  Can I override the Name behavior?

If not, should I read between the lines and determine that UIA is an unacceptable way to perform automation against HTML since it effectively means many controls will not be uniquely identifiable and distinguishable from other controls?  That doesn't make any sense to me since some controls map just fine (eg - a Button using where Name = Value property) and can be automated against without incident.

Thanks for any help

Answer 1

Have you looked into ARIA? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/hh452704.aspx

Answer 2

Thanks for the reply! I am looking at those pages now. Adding the ARIA properties might be a reasonable way to enable accessibility of these input controls, however, does that mean that there is no way to set the Automation ID outside of ARIA? Thanks

Answer 3

Why wouldn't the HTML ID be mapped to the Automation ID or Name?

Answer 4

Still battling with this... I've made some attempts with ARIA to get this to work, still no useable Name or Automation ID.

Here's the HTML of an Input control:

		<td><input name="GeneralInfoView$PortfolioIdTextbox" type="text" maxlength="30" id="GeneralInfoView_PortfolioIdTextbox" class="detailText" role="textbox" aria-label="PortfolioIdTextbox" style="width:80%;" /></td>

Note the use of the aria-label property which should map to UI Automation Name according to this page

And here's the Inspect output:

No Name or Automation ID. 

So, can anyone please provide me with some assistance as to how to expose HTML Input Controls where type = 'Text' to UI Automation?

Thanks for any and all assistance!

Answer 5

After some trial and error I was able to get the aria-labelled property to give me a Name property.  Still haven't figured out any way to populate AutomationID.

		<td><span id="GeneralInfoView_PortfolioIdLabel" class="detailStrongLabel">ID</span></td>
		<td><input name="GeneralInfoView$PortfolioIdTextbox" type="text" maxlength="30" id="GeneralInfoView_PortfolioIdTextbox" class="detailText" aria-labelledby="GeneralInfoView_PortfolioIdLabel" style="width:80%;" /></td>

The ability to set an AutomationID would be much more useful, but maybe this will be helpful to someone else.

Can I mark my own post as the answer?

Answer 6

You'll probably find more help with HTML in the Internet Explorer Web Development forum