XC UITesting with Dynamic Labels

Question

I'm trying to assert that the value of a label (which is populated dynamically) contains a substring as part of the result of a UITest.

My issue is that XCTAssert doesn't seem to allow for substrings or approximate matches (from what I can find anyway). Does anyone have any advice on how I might write the following to find a match for "hours ago" instead of the specific "xx hours ago"?

At present I'm only able to get this to work with exact matches (as below).

    //Set up an expectation
    let textToFind = app.staticTexts["13 hours ago"]

    let exists = NSPredicate(format: "exists == true")
    expectationForPredicate(exists, evaluatedWithObject: textToFind, handler: nil)

    //Give the app time to get network data & Update UI
    waitForExpectationsWithTimeout(5, handler: nil)

    //Assert that we get results
    XCTAssert(textToFind.exists)

Answer 1

1. Change the query that finds your UI element to do so by a method other than its name. The UI test recording feature in Xcode can help you work through this — see the WWDC2015 session introducing UI testing for an example of doing this.

2. Once you've found your UI element without using its name, your expectation test can use a predicate that tests the name for a substring.

Or:

1. Explicitly use a query to find app's subelement matching a predicate (see elementMatchingPredicate in XCUIElementQuery) rather than subscripting, then you can use your exists test to verify that it's there. Again, see the WWDC session for examples.