How to read a value from MenuItem in XCUITest?

Question

I have a menu item that looks like a checkbox:

I would like to click/not-click on it depending on the current value. How do I get the current value?

My code for accessing and clicking it looks like this:

let menuBars = application.menuBars
let outlineModeMenuItem = menuBars.menuItems["outline_mode"]
outlineModeMenuItem.click()

The element structure looks like this:

Attributes: MenuItem, {{0.0, 401.0}, {220.0, 22.0}}, identifier: 'outline_mode', title: 'Outline Mode', Disabled
Element subtree:
 →MenuItem, 0x11e14e410, {{0.0, 401.0}, {220.0, 22.0}}, identifier: 'outline_mode', title: 'Outline Mode', Disabled
Path to element:
 →Application, 0x10f10cf00, pid: 90531, title: 'Vectornator', Disabled
  ↳MenuBar, 0x11e1178a0, {{0.0, 0.0}, {1440.0, 24.0}}
   ↳MenuBarItem, 0x11ce5bad0, {{401.0, 0.0}, {50.0, 24.0}}, title: 'View'
    ↳Menu, 0x11ce5bbe0, {{401.0, 24.0}, {220.0, 682.0}}
     ↳MenuItem, 0x11e14e410, {{0.0, 401.0}, {220.0, 22.0}}, identifier: 'outline_mode', title: 'Outline Mode', Disabled

So it doesn't have any "checkbox" item above or below it. value for it is empty :/ UI reads checkbox value from UICommand.state, but that doesn't seem to be exposed on XCUIElement.

Answer 1

outlineModeMenuItem.isEnabled is the call you're looking for. It should return true when it is checked and false when it's not.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xctest/xcuielementattributes documents other attribute checks you might be interested in. I've not worked with a MenuItem before so it is possible isSelected might be what you're looking for.

Answer 2

So far everything points that it is not possible.

UICommand has accessibilityValue but it seems not to have any effect and actually loses value. This answer seems to confirm that too: https://stackoverflow.com/a/60317536/217022

The only way I found was to modify the title when you know that you're running UI tests. Or expose these values in some other way unrelated to UICommand.

Answer 3

I don't know if that could be applied in your case but a hacky workaround you can use is to check the startX coordinate or the length of the MenuItem element to determine whether there is a checkmark there or not. I would not actually recommend it though because it is not very flexible and should probably be handled for all possible device widths