Is it sensible to put 'shake simulator' into fbsimctl?

[sleekweasel]

We want to test the shake gesture in our tests, without having to run at least one simulator with a head and direct shake-reliant tests to that device, then using applescript to send the 'shake' keyboard shortcut to the window.

I found some code about triggering shake here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10154958/ios-how-to-detect-shake-motion but while it looked like it ran in an iOS context, the WDA team said that wasn't something WDA could do and they closed the issue.

I had a look through the simulator control code, but I'm not familiar with MacOS/iOS development. Is shaking something that fbsimctl could tell the simulator to effect?

Thanks.

[lawrencelomax]

Yes this is absolutely possible. You can see how this is synthesized by the Simulator.app in the -[SimDevice gsEventsSendShake] method. This uses the PurpleWorkspacePort and mach_msg_send to synthesize a 'Purple' event to the Simulator.

You can read more about how the Simulator.app synthesizes input events here. The headers for a Purple event are available here

[lawrencelomax]

Bear in mind that the code that you link to runs inside an Application by faking a shake notification. FBSimulatorControl does not have components that run inside a Simulator, it automates the Simulator from the outside. The approach that would make most sense for FBSimulatorControl is to use the APIs that the Simulator.app uses.

[sleekweasel]

I'm afraid I've resorted to running one simulator with a head and directing shake-aware tests to that one. We only have a few, so it's not the worst compromise.

[rubu]

@lawrencelomax thanks for leaving the keywords, that info was super helpful for implementing this (#885 , i left it as draft since the python side is not done), but it works via grpc. Hope that anyone else looking for this functionality finds this useful.