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Headless automation of XUser

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For testing, games might want to automate the addition of users into their game. With the Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK), users are only added when the game calls XUserAddAsync. With respect to automation, this function has the following two main limitations.

  • If you call XUserAddAsync with the AddDefaultUserSilentlyflag, you don't get UI (which helps with the automation). However, you can only get the user who launched the game. Calling the API repeatedly with this flag doesn't change the result. You'll just keep getting new handles to the same users.
  • If you call XUserAddAsync without the AddDefaultUserSilently flag, the UI appears and waits for someone to push a button. This breaks automation.

To aid in the automation of adding users in test code, the Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) has support for turning on a headless option where you can add users without having UI show that requires user input. The following steps outline the basic approach.

  1. To add a signed-in user to the console, you can use the xbuser (NDA topic) command-line tool with the signin option. Repeat this step for each user.
  2. To suppress the UI that would usually show when adding a user in the game, you can use the xbconfig (NDA topic) command-line tool with the HeadlessXuser option, shown as follows. 
    xbconfig HeadlessXUser=true
  3. Launch the game.
  4. When in the game, each call to XUserAddAsync that doesn't have the AddDefaultUserSilently flag returns the first user who signed in to the console and has no outstanding XUserHandle objects associated to them by the game.
  5. If the game keeps calling XUserAddAsync, it eventually exhausts the number of users who are signed in to the console. After this happens, XUserAddAsync returns E_ABORT. This is the exact same error that XUserAddAsync would have returned if the user had canceled out of signing in to the console (or otherwise backed out of the UI).
  6. For testing purposes, games might want to know the number of test accounts that are signed in to the console. To facilitate this, games can call CreateProcess and launch the wduser command-line tool with the list option.