Android : How to set a date of an html5 datepicker using appium in android?

I'm trying to create automated tests for a hybrid app which has an html5 date input type. I'm using Appium in combination with robot framework (python) and I try to use the Appium library for the robot framework as much as possible.

For some reason I can't set the date of the datepicker. I've tried a couple of different things:

• Using input text (send keys) on the datepicker input


• Clicking on the datepicker so it opens up the popup date selector And then trying to set the individual fields using different locators such as:

Name (The name changes once you send a key to the field which causes the next i've tried:

name=Sep

But when i try to put in Jan it stops after the J has been entered.

Xpath (for some reason this returns all fields where it should only return 1 field) i've tried the following xpath locators:

//android.widget.DatePicker//android.widget.LinearLayout[1]/android.widget.EditText
//android.widget.DatePicker//android.widget.ImageButton[@content-desc="Increase month"/../android.widget.EditText

this is the structure of the datepicker

  Datepicker
      LinearLayout
        LinearLayout
          LinearLayout
            ImageButton {increase month}
            EditText:Sep
            ImageButton {decrease month}
          LinearLayout
            ImageButton {increase day}
            EditText:29
            ImageButton {decrease day}
          LinearLayout
            ImageButton {increase year}
            EditText:2014
            ImageButton {decrease year}

I can't think of anything else to do to set the date of the datepicker. Is there an easy way to set the date for the html5 datepicker?