How to get a reference to ActionBar MenuItem in Android Test Project

Question

I want to get a reference to a MenuItem from the ActionBar of an activity for unit testing purpose.

@Override
protected void setUp() throws Exception{
    super.setUp();
    viewContacts = getActivity();

    addContactsBtn = (MenuItem)viewContacts.findViewById(R.id.action_add);
    searchBtn = (MenuItem)viewContacts.findViewById(R.id.action_search);

}

where, action_add and action_search are defined in my menu.xml file as follows

<item
    android:id="@+id/action_search"
    android:orderInCategory="0"
    android:showAsAction="always"
    android:icon="@drawable/ic_action_search"
    android:title="@string/action_search"/>
<item 
    android:id="@+id/action_add"
    android:orderInCategory="1"
    android:showAsAction="always"
    android:icon="@drawable/ic_action_add"
    android:title="@string/action_add"/>

The test case throws ClassCastException-

java.lang.ClassCastException: com.android.internal.view.menu.ActionMenuItemView cannot be cast to android.view.MenuItem at com.example.simplecontacts.test.ViewContactsTest.setUp(ViewContactsTest.java:24) at android.test.AndroidTestRunner.runTest(AndroidTestRunner.java:190) at android.test.AndroidTestRunner.runTest(AndroidTestRunner.java:175) at android.test.InstrumentationTestRunner.onStart(InstrumentationTestRunner.java:555) at android.app.Instrumentation$InstrumentationThread.run(Instrumentation.java:1661)

I researched ways to obtain a reference to a MenuItem. Usual way to do this is via the Menu/MenuItem arguments passed into the onOptionsItemSelected, onPrepareOptionsMenu methods. That is perfectly logical in the application project itself but how should I obtain MenuItem reference inside the test project?

Answer 1

Well, it turns out that casting them into View objects is sufficient for unit testing purpose. So the code will be like so

addContactsBtn = (View)viewContacts.findViewById(R.id.action_add);
searchBtn = (View)viewContacts.findViewById(R.id.action_search);