Any faster way to dump UI hierarchy?

Question

Right now I'm using uiautomator do dump the UI like this:

adb shell uiautomator dump

And it works fine except that it takes around 3 seconds to perform it. So I wonder if there is a faster way to do it? Like creating a service that dump the UI or will it take just as long?

Answer 1

Guess I should answer my own question as I found a better way to do it. I found this project that use uiautomator togheter with a light weight rpc server so you can send commands to the device:

https://github.com/xiaocong/android-uiautomator-server#build

This make the dumping almost instantly and works really nice. He also have a python project if you want to see how to make the rpc calls:

https://github.com/xiaocong/uiautomator

But I have created a small example here.

Start the server:

# Start the process
process = subprocess.Popen(
        'adb shell uiautomator runtest '
        'bundle.jar uiautomator-stub.jar '
        '-c com.github.uiautomatorstub.Stub', stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)
# Forward adb ports 
subprocess.call('adb forward tcp:9008 tcp:9009')

Function to call commands ("ping", "dumpWindowHierarchy" etc):

def send_command(self, method_name, *args):
    """
    Send command to the RPC server

    Args:
        method_name(string): Name of method to run
        *args: Arguments
    """
    data = {
        'jsonrpc': '2.0',
        'method': method_name,
        'id': 1,
    }
    if args:
        data['params'] = args
    request = urllib2.Request(
        'http://localhost:{0}/jsonrpc/0'.format(self.local_port),
        json.dumps(data),
        {
            'Content-type': 'application/json'
        })
    try:
        result = urllib2.urlopen(request, timeout=30)
    except Exception as e:
        return None
    if result is None:
        return None
    json_result = json.loads(result.read())
    if 'error' in json_result:
        raise JsonRPCError('1',
                           'Exception when sending command to '
                           'UIAutomatorServer: {0}'.format(
                               json_result['error']))
    return json_result['result']

Note that you have to push the files (bundle.jar anduiautomator-stub.jar) from the first project to the device first and put them in "/data/local/tmp/"

Answer 2

Now it's 2021, it's easier to use https://github.com/openatx/uiautomator2

pip install --upgrade --pre uiautomator2
python
>>> import uiautomator2 as u2
>>> d=u2.connect()
>>> d.dump_hierarchy()