What's an efficient way to select an element by accessibility label in selenium-webdriver and appium?

Question

I've just started auto end-to-end testing with my react native app, both ios and android, context is nodejs. Client is selenium-webdriver, which connects to appium server.

According to several sources, the best way to locate an element in React Native is to supply an accessibilityLabel to a View. However, in selenium-webdriver, there's no such function like:

driver.find_elements_by_accessibility_id('some id')

Currently I'm using a workaround instead:

driver.findElement(By.xpath('//*[@accessibilityLabel="some label"]'))

As it traverses all attributes of all elements, not hard to imagine its low efficiency. What could be a better approach?

P.S. I chose selenweb driveriver as client because it's also used for testing our web app, so I don't need to go through another learning curve. But if needed, I'm happy to switch to another client.

Answer 1

You can do this with plain selenium webdriver like so:

driver.find_element("accessibility id", "some id")

That is basically all the helper method in the appium client is doing behind the scenes. It even works directly with WinAppDriver apart from Appium.