I'm working on testing an android app for the Vuzix Blade AR glasses. Vuzix has a library for apps on their devices called HUD-actionmenu which automatically turns a standard dropdown menu into a horizontally scrolling "action menu". I'm writing tests in Espresso, but I'm running into an issue where my tests can only see views that exist within the action menu. If I look for a view, either by id or by text, or any other attribute, I get an error that that view isn't found within the action's hierarchy. The strange thing is that the hierarchy diagram displayed in the error shows ActionMenuBar as the top layer, and only includes views inside the action menu. None of the other views that appear on the screen are exist within the displayed hierarchy, even though they're visible and working fine when running the actual app.
I didn't develop the app, I'm only responsible for the testing, so I may be overlooking something obvious. I'm relatively new to my role as a test engineer, and I've been learning Kotlin and Android development as a whole from scratch for this project. What I have figured out is that each activity class in this app extends ActionMenuActivity, from the Vuzix library, instead of AppCompatActivity. ActionMenuActivity itself extends DynamicThemeActivity (also a Vuzix component), which in turn extends AppCompatActivity. It seems like something is happening in there that is limiting the visible hierarchy of MainActivity (for example) to just the hierarchy of the action menu, but allowing the rest of the views the function as expected. I'm sure Vuzix Blades aren't the most common platform for app development, but I'm wondering if anyone has encountered something similar or has any ideas how I can get around this issue and run tests against all the views in the app, not just the ones inside the action menu.
