How to Access Activity from ActivityScenarioRule

Question

I am using ActivityScenarioRule for Espresso UI Testing and I wanted to get access to the method getStringArray(), calling which requires the Activity . So, is there any way to retrieve the Activity by the ActivityScenarioRule , maybe something similar to getActivity in ActivityTestRule.

@Rule
    public ActivityScenarioRule activityScenarioRule = new ActivityScenarioRule<>(MainActivity.class);

I am not using ActivityTestRule, because it is deprecated!

Answer 1

Espresso states the following:

At the same time, the framework prevents direct access to activities and views of the application because holding on to these objects and operating on them off the UI thread is a major source of test flakiness.

When there is no other way I use the following method to get an arbitrary activity from an ActivityScenarioRule. It uses onActivity mentioned in the accepted answer:

private <T extends Activity> T getActivity(ActivityScenarioRule<T> activityScenarioRule) {
        AtomicReference<T> activityRef = new AtomicReference<>();
        activityScenarioRule.getScenario().onActivity(activityRef::set);
        return activityRef.get();
    }

Any onView(...) code inside onActivity led to a timeout in my testcases. So, I extracted the activity and used it with success outside the onActivity. Beware tho! See the statement above.