Simulating Mouse Events

I've been struggling to find a suitable testing method to test the Android applications I'm developing. As I'm relatively new to testing UI's I didn't have much to fall back on.

I first began looking at LDTP, but found that the raw mouse events were limited to click and double-clicking left and right buttons. I needed something more flexible to support swiping the Android Emulator.

What I found was 'xdotool' which seems to hit all the marks; activating a window, depressing either mouse button, moving the mouse, and releasing the button(s). Introducting a delay between mouse down and up allows for long press events.

e.g.

$ xdotool windowactivate `exec xdotool search --title 5554:myAvd`
$ xdotool mouse move 100 100
$ xdotool mousedown 1
$ xdotool mouse move 200 200
$ xdotool mouseup 1

Cheers.