Espresso idling resource

The centerpiece of Espresso is its ability to seamlessly synchronize all test operations with the application being tested. By default, Espresso waits for UI events in the current message queue to be handled and for default instances of AsyncTask to complete before it moves on to the next test operation.

However, there are instances where applications perform background operations, such as communicating with web services, using non-standard means, such as direct creation and management of threads.

In such cases, you have to use idling resources to inform Espresso of the app’s long-running operations.

Creating and registering idling resources

You can implement the IdlingResource interface yourself or use an already-existing implementation, such as CountingIdlingResource, included in the espresso-idling-resource package.

This interface needs to be exposed to the test or created within it and injected into the application. Then, register one or more of your idling resources with Espresso by calling Espresso.registerIdlingResource() in the test setup.

Check out the Espresso idling resource sample.

Implementing idling resources

There are two common ways to implement idling resources:

• Counting running jobs: When a job starts, increment a counter. When it finishes, decrement it. The app is idle if the counter is zero. This approach is very simple and accounts for most situations. CountingIdlingResource uses this approach.
• Querying state: It might be more reliable to ask a work queue or an web client if it is busy. If the state is exposed, implementing an idling resource is trivial.

Note that there are idling resource implementations for popular libraries, such as okhttp-idling-resource.