XCode Test Automation For IPhone

Question

I would like to have my iphone test app to be tested automatically in an IPhone. The following are the steps I would like to have:

1. compile, link and code sign the iphone app (Xcodebuild)
2. upload the newly built app to iphone
3. run the uploaded app in iphone automatically
4. collect the result from the gdb console
5. close the app

Right now, I have problem with step 2 and 3 where I cannot do it automatically (I can do it from XCode via "Build and Debug" button. This, however, will require manual clicking).

I did some research on automator and it does not answer my problem. Another option I am thinking about is to have the app compiled for iphone simulator and run it from there, but I am not sure how accurate the test result will be comparing to the real device.

I am new to Mac/IPhone development, perhaps someone has a better way of testing this. Any feedback and input are welcome. Thanks.

Answer 1

The comment section does not provide a good way of display the solution properly. Here is the summary of answer.

The task of building IPhone app, uploading and trigger the debug process on IPhone is done via AppleScript. Here is how the AppleScript looks like:

tell application "Xcode"
    open "Users:chuan:Desktop:iphone_manual_client:iphone_manual_client.xcodeproj"
    tell project "iphone_manual_client"
        clean
        build
        (* for some reasons, debug will hang even the debug process has completed. 
           The try block is created to suppress the AppleEvent timeout error 
         *)
        try
            debug
        end try
    end tell
    quit
end tell

AppleScript accepts ":" instead of "/" for file and folder separator.

The GDB console output can be captured by setting the GDB option to write it to file. this is done by typing the following command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXGDBDebuggerLogToFile YES 
defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXGDBDebuggerLogFileName <path to my gdb output file>

Lastly, many thanks to various ppl who have helped to solve this problem.