Testing progress bar on Android with Espresso

Question

The workflow should be the following:

1. Activity starts
2. Progress bar is visible
3. Network request fires (idling resource is already registered so espresso knows how to wait for it).
4. Progress bar is hidden
5. Text from network is shown.

Up to this point, I have written assertions for steps 1, 3, 5 and it works perfectly:

onView(withText("foo 1"))
    .check(matches(isDisplayed()));

Problem is, I have no idea how to let espresso know to verify the visibility of progress bar before the request is made and after the request is made.

Consider the onCreate() method is the following:

super.onCreate(...);
setContentView(...);

showProgressBar(true);
apiClient.getStuff(new Callback() {
    public void onSuccess() {
        showProgressBar(false);
    }
});

I have tried the following but it doesn't work:

// Activity is launched at this point.
activityRule.launchActivity(new Intent());

// Up to this point, the request has been fired and response was 
// returned, so the progress bar is now GONE.
onView(withId(R.id.progress_bar))
   .check(matches(isDisplayed()));

onView(withId(R.id.progress_bar))
    .check(matches(not(isDisplayed())));

The reason this is happening is because, since the client is registered as an idling resource, espresso will wait until it is idle again before running the first onView(...progressbar...)... so I need a way to let espresso know to run that BEFORE going to idle.

EDIT: this doesn't work either:

idlingResource.registerIdleTransitionCallback(new IdlingResource.ResourceCallback() {
        @Override
        public void onTransitionToIdle() {
            onView(withId(R.id.progress_bar))
                    .check(matches(isDisplayed()));
        }
    });

Answer 1

Espresso has problems with the animation. You can just set the drawable of the progress bar to something static just for the test and it works as expected.

Drawable notAnimatedDrawable = ContextCompat.getDrawable(getActivity(), R.drawable.whatever);
((ProgressBar) getActivity().findViewById(R.id.progress_bar)).setIndeterminateDrawable(notAnimatedDrawable);

onView(withId(R.id.progress_bar)).check(matches(isDisplayed()));