Android hierarchyviewer unable to load window data

Question

I'm trying to use the hierarchyviewer tool to see the layout of my Android app.

I can run hierarchyviewer, and see the emulator running. I click on <Focused Window> and try to load the view hierarchy and get the error:

Unable to load window data for window <Focused Window> on device emulator-5554.

I'm developing on OSX (10.6.5) using Eclipse 3.5.2. I'm currently debugging through Eclipse, in a custom-sized emulator. I have updated the Android tools to the latest (revision 8) with the AVD and SDK manager in Eclipse. I haven't found any threads searching for the error message, or for general heirarchy viewer problems.

Does anyone have an idea how to get the tool working?

Answer 1

I found an application's view hierarchy does not load when the the app is under debug. Have you tried dismissing the debugger and just starting the app from the launch icon?

Answer 2

In my case it was a carriage return character (U+000D) in one of my TextViews which prevented the hierarchyviewer from loading the window data.

These thinks do not help in this case:

• cleaning the project
• deploying the app not in debug-mode
• closing eclipse
• running adb kill-server && adb start-server
• trying other views like com.android.settings.Settings or com.android.development.Development (which worked fine)

Answer 3

For mac add ~/work/android-sdk/tools$ ANDROID_HVPROTO=ddm monitor

or steps outlined here: http://developer.android.com/tools/performance/hierarchy-viewer/setup.html

Answer 4

Problem is it only support Only Gingerbread and higher. https://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/tree/browse_frm/thread/b8aac9fe39ec1941