Sending upper case letters to a TextEdit during instrumented tests

Question

I am writing a JUnit test case for my Android app. The test class extends ActivityInstrumentationTestCase2 and calls sendKeys() to emulate user input for TextEdit widgets. However, all of the alphabetic keycodes (e.g. KeyEvent.KEYCODE_G) only send lower case letters to the TextEdit. I tried sending KeyEvent.KEYCODE_SHIFT_LEFT before sending an alphabetic keycode, but that didn't seem to work. So how do I simulate the user typing an upper-case letter?

Edit:

I can enter upper case letters manually. In fact, the EditText is defined as

    <EditText android:id="@id/brand_text"
              android:singleLine="true"
              android:capitalize="words"
              android:hint="@string/brand_hint"
    />

The android:capitalize="words" attribute forces the onscreen keyboard into uppercase mode in the emulator. (I assume it will do the same on a device but don't have one to test it on.) Since the emulator which comes with the SDK doesn't emulate the hardware keyboard, I have been unable to test how my UI works using hard keys.

I also tried

EditText brandText = this.activity.findViewById(R.id.brand_text);
brandText.setText(someString);

However, the test failed when I did this. I axed all that code, so I don't have the details here at the moment. I will try to recreate it and edit this question with those details.

Answer 1

I didn't mention in my OP that I was writing a method to send the characters of a String to a text box. I tried using setText() as @PaulHarris suggested but couldn't get it to work; my tests still failed some assertions.

After some digging, finally found Instrumentation.sendStringSync() which works for my purposes. (You can get an Instrumentation object by calling getInstrumentation() in your test class.)

Answer 2

If you want to do something like:

EditText brandText = this.activity.findViewById(R.id.brand_text);
brandText.setText(someString);

What you actually need to do is:

EditText brandText = this.activity.findViewById(R.id.brand_text);
instrumentation.runOnMainSync(new Runnable() {
    @Override
    public void run() {
        brandText.setText(someString);
    }
}); 

This is because you need to do any interaction with the gui on the UI Thread (or main thread whatever name you prefer).

A method such as this:

public void setText(EditText editText, final String textToSet){
    instrumentation.runOnMainSync(new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            brandText.setText(textToSet);
        }
    }); 
}

should work for you just fine.