Category Archives: Workflow

Unbuffering Jenkins Output

For years I have used Jenkins to manage all my automated Mac and iOS builds. I have jobs set up to build and release apps “on demand,” as well as integration builds that kick off whenever a change is made to a pertinent source code repository.

For years I have also put up with a small but vexing nuisance that when something goes wrong with a build, I have to search in the most unlikely place for pertinent informational messages printed by my build scripts: at the very bottom of the log.

I had chalked it up for so long to being a nuanced Jenkins bug, that I never took the time to get down to basics and really unwrap what is going on. Today, I did that, and also came up with an easy solution.

I use a custom script to drive the whole process for each of my automated builds. This script is responsible for printing diagnostic information and for invoking other tools (such as xcodebuild) to get the actual work of building, testing, and uploading done.

The problem with the misplaced log lines in my console output has to do with a feature of the scripting language I use to drive the process: standard output buffering. I use Python, but the problem could also affect you if you use a language such as Ruby to drive your automation.

Here’s a contrived example of a build script that will exhibit the problem. If you create a new, empty Jenkins build job, and configure it with a single “Execute Shell” build task:

#!/usr/bin/python 

import os

print "start"
os.system("ls -ld /Applications/TextEdit.app")
print "end"

You will find the generated console output upon “building” this job is demonstrably out of order:

[workspace] $ /usr/bin/python /var/folders/wh/f_vmqvxx34d69c1pm191t0tr0000gq/T/hudson321577740740596707.sh
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 root  wheel  102 Dec 13 14:00 /Applications/TextEdit.app
start
end

The message from the “ls” subprocess prints right away, but Python buffers the output until it’s done running, leading a nonsensical printing of the “start” and “end” messages after the job is completely done.

Now I will make a tiny change, passing the “-u” parameter to the Python invocation in the script. This option is documented to “Force stdin, stdout and stderr to be totally unbuffered”:

#!/usr/bin/python -u

Running the job again in Jenkins produces the expected output in Jenkins:

[workspace] $ /usr/bin/python -u /var/folders/wh/f_vmqvxx34d69c1pm191t0tr0000gq/T/hudson3255283214356026397.sh
start
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 root  wheel  102 Dec 13 14:00 /Applications/TextEdit.app
end

This is a small annoyance in this example, but in a real-world scenario it means that the pertinent xcodebuild invocation, which I print to the console before calling, will now show up where it belongs in the console log, making it much easier for me to reason about the behavior of my automated builds when they aren’t working as they should.

Convenient Build Settings

I wrote almost ten years ago about a trick I use in my Xcode projects that lets me set the marketing version for my products in one place, a build setting, and then reference that build setting everywhere else the version number needs to be expressed. This is a cool trick that has saved me a bunch of dumb hand-editing over the years.

And yet, all these years I have been laboriously, and usually behind schedule, updating my source bases every year to advance the range of years that my copyright statement applies to. For example, here is the string for MarsEdit’s NSHumanReadableCopyright string:

MarsEdit ${APPLICATION_VERSION}, ©2003-2015 Red Sweater Software

You can see my use there of the aforementioned marketing version build setting. With the opportunity staring me in the face, why have I spent the past decade manually advancing the year from 2005 to 2006 to 2007 to … well, I guess the charitable explanation would be that I’ve had better things to do, but that particular tedium also ends today.

My projects make heavy use of Xcode configuration files, such that every application or framework target inherits consistent default build settings that reflect my opinions about which warnings should be enabled, what platforms to support, etc. My configuration files all take advantage of a kind of cascade of imported files such that ultimately, every target in every Xcode project in my source base inherits settings from a file called RS-Target-All.xcconfig, and every project likewise inherits settings from RS-Project-All.xccconfig.

Today I added a simple line to RS-Project-All.xcconfig:

CURRENT_YEAR = 2015

The result is that every project and target in my source base now has access to this custom build setting, thus I can change the contents of all my NSHumanReadableCopyright strings to e.g.:

MarsEdit ${APPLICATION_VERSION}, ©2003-${CURRENT_YEAR} Red Sweater Software

And I will never have to update the marketing string’s copyright year again, on any of my projects, for as many years as I keep updating and releasing new versions of them. Quite appropriately, the terminating year on the copyright span will always be the year when I built and shipped the app. All I have to do every January is edit the solitary Xcode configuration file.

Technically I could go a step further and incorporate the product name as a variable as well:

${PRODUCT_NAME} ${APPLICATION_VERSION}, ©2003-${CURRENT_YEAR} Red Sweater Software

But since the product name isn’t changing all the time, that just starts to feel a bit fussy.

Some people also take advantage of the Xcode option to preprocess the Info.plist file, which could potentially allow for even more fancy substitutions. Maybe you could use the C preprocessor’s built-in __DATE__ variable to extract just the current year somehow? I never turned on preprocessing of Info.plist files because, at least when I last considered it, there seemed to be some bugs with it.

For now, I’m satisfied by the little bits of time that defining this once will save me, not to mention the avoidance of inevitable errors I would make when editing each occurrence by hand.

Same Tests, Different Class

I recently decided to tackle a long-postponed refactoring of my source base: to move from my own, custom CFNetwork-based “URL request” class, to something based on the modern NSURLConnection or NSURLSession classes from Apple.

When I first started writing networking code for OS X, NSURLConnection didn’t exist yet. If you wanted a class that approximated the convenience of NSURLConnection as we know it today, you had to write your own wrappers around the lower-level CFNetwork HTTP library functions. If you needed to have precise control over the loading of network resources from the web, you simply had to use CFNetwork (or the 3rd-party open-source libcurl library, which some folks did do!.)

When I acquired MarsEdit from NewsGator in early 2007, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Brent Simmons (the original author) had also implemented his own CFNetwork-based HTTP class: RSHTTPDownloader. I took a look at it and my own class, RSHTTPRequest, and ended up migrating the best parts of his with the best parts of mine, keeping the name I had grown accustomed to: RSHTTPRequest. (It was a great convenience that Brent’s Ranchero Software and and my Red Sweater adopted the same class-name prefix).

Fun fact: I actually worked briefly on the CFNetwork team at Apple, and learned the ropes of that somewhat-daunting, low-level API. Suffice to say, I was less scared off by CFNetwork than some people, but even I didn’t consider it to be perfectly simple to use. However, it worked well enough and when NSURLConnection debuted later in 2007, I found it somewhat wanting. I can’t remember the details but there were little things that I’d come to appreciate about having direct access to the “streams” and I lost that by moving to NSURLConnection. So I stuck with RSHTTPRequest.

Fast-forward more than seven years and I’m still on RSHTTPRequest. But now, it’s clearly to my detriment. Not only has Apple been improving NSURLConnection and the rest of the networking stack all this time, a couple years ago they introduced the all new NSURLSession, which makes the whole setup easier to use and more powerful at the same time. Capping off the incentives is the fact that new functionality such as background network loading sessions are essentially required if you want to make good use of recent technologies such as Share Extensions. In short, it’s a great time to switch to NSURLSession.

Just Switch to NSURLSession!

The only problem is I’ve spent more than seven years building a pretty complex network-oriented app around this one, I hesitate to say little anymore, this one disgusting evolution of what started out as a simple wrapper around CFNetwork’s HTTP loading mechanism. RSHTTPRequest has every manner of convenience method, special cases, not to mention subclasses covering highly specialized networking operations such as POST’ing HTTP forms, communicating with most blogging APIs on the planet, etc. You get the idea: I can’t just switch to NSURLSession. So what am I going to do?

I’m a very paranoid person when it comes to code, and it soothes me to take small, predictable, measurably safe steps when it comes to situations like this. I already have a number of unit tests on RSHTTPRequest that verify its behavior to a reasonable extent. The basics are covered, and as I’ve discovered and addressed bugs over the years, I’ve usually taken the time to add unit tests covering the nuances. So to be perfectly clear, the main impediments to my switching to NSURLSession are:

  1. The interface to NSURLSession is totally different from my custom class.
  2. The default behavior of NSURLSession is totally different from my custom class.

So I could hunker down for a long weekend, write a new NSURLSession-based helper, RSSpiffyRequest, and then change every single line of code that deals with RSHTTPRequest to instead use the pertinent methods on the new class. One problem with this approach is that I have to come up with the all new RSSpiffyRequest interface from scratch, before I change a single line of code. The other problem is even if I come up with the perfect interface for my new class, I’ll inherit all the unpredictably different behaviors of NSURLSession. Things will randomly not work. Crashes will probably happen. It will suck.

The only way forward, to my paranoid mind, is to find a way to slow down the transition so that fewer parts are changing at once. Since RSHTTPRequest already satisfies a contract with countless clients, and because it’s already covered by a moderate number of unit tests, the safest way forward is to change RSHTTPRequest so that it’s based on NSURLSession.

But hold on, that’s too fast for me, too. I don’t want to reimplement RSHTTPRequest’s whole interface at once, hold my breath, and hope that all the code still works. Instead, I need a new class that implements the interface of RSHTTPRequest, can be tested like RSHTTPRequest, and can be moved to by client code gradually, as the expected behavior is confirmed.

Parallel Request Classes

The approach I decided to take is to add a new class, RSLegacyHTTPRequest. The name is future-proofed: the presence of the word “Legacy” in the name is to remind me that it’s not the end-all be-all NSURLSession subclass. It’s not the ideal, convenient networking object that should be used across my source base. Instead, it’s the nasty, pragmatic, full-of-history class interface of RSHTTPRequest that happens to be implemented on top of NSURLSession.

This gives me the freedom to willy-nilly switch client code from RSHTTPRequest to RSLegacyHTTPRequest, just to see what happens. A great place to start was in the RSHTTPRequest unit tests class I mentioned. It currently verifies the behavior of RSHTTPRequest for most all niggling network details I’ve encountered over seven years. I switched it from testing RSHTTPRequest to testing RSLegacyHTTPRequest by simply adding this to the top of the test file:

#define RSHTTPRequest RSLegacyHTTPRequest

Boom! Everything fails. That’s a nice start, and makes for an easy challenge to chip away at. Pick a failing unit test, and make it work. In my case this involved discovering how to simulate or approximate the interface of the old RSHTTPRequest, but on top of NSURLSession. Slowly but surely, I came to a point where I had a new RSLegacyHTTPRequest class, completely based on NSURLConnection, that passes all my existing tests.

I was far from done. I have other classes that use RSHTTPRequest, and themselves have unit tests of their own. I pulled a similar trick to uncover other unit testing edge cases that should have been in RSHTTPRequest, but weren’t. I was beefing up my test class, in some cases even finding residual bugs from my old implementation.

I got to a point today where I realized I had a more-or-less “fully” functional RSLegacyHTTPRequest class, but I am still not ready to abandon RSHTTPRequest. I have other clients to meander through, verifying that they behave as expected when switched over to the new class. In the mean time, I was stuck wondering whether the unit tests, those golden unit tests, should be left testing the old RSHTTPRequest or testing the new RSLegacyHTTPRequest? Answer: they’re both in use, so both should be tested.

Multi-Class Unit Tests

Finally we get to the namesake of this article’s title: how do I use the same precious collection of unit testing code but apply it to two (or more!) classes that happen to share the same interface? The answer is to subclass. When you implement and run unit tests in an Xcode project, the testing system looks at runtime for any classes in the test bundle that “have methods that start with -test”. What this means is that, if you wanted to, you could redundantly run all the unit tests in one of your test cases twice simply by subclassing it and leaving the subclass empty. If “MyTests2” is a subclass of “MyTests”, then at runtime, it’s going to find and execute all the tests in each of the classes, which will happen to be exactly the same tests.

For my situation, I want to run all the tests twice, but I want to run them on instances of different class. I decided to accomplish this by making some modest edits to the test class, replacing every alloc/init pair for RSHTTPRequest:

[[RSHTTPRequest alloc] init...]

With a bottleneck method that instantiates the class from an overridable Class object:

- (Class) classForHTTPRequestInstances
{
	return [RSHTTPRequest class];
}

- (RSHTTPRequest*) requestForTestingWithURL:(NSURL*)theURL
{
	return [[[self classForHTTPRequestInstances] alloc] init...];
}

I then added a new unit test class called “RSLegacyHTTPRequestTests”, which merely implements -classForHTTPRequestInstances to return RSHLegacyHTTPRequest. Now when I build and run unit tests, every single, painstakingly collected unit test gets run twice, once for each of the super-important URL request wrapper classes in my framework.

Over time, hopefully over a short period of time, I’ll move away from RSHTTPRequest to RSLegacyHTTPRequest. And then, hopefully over a similarly short period of time, I’ll start moving to RSSpiffyRequest. All the while, however, I’ll rest easy at night, knowing that to a very great extent, all the functionality I’ve come to expect over years of developing this code is being constantly confirmed by this glorious set of unit tests.

Speeding Up Custom Script Phases

Some Xcode projects use a handy feature for extending the build process called a Run Script build phase. These build phases can be added to the linear list of steps that Xcode steps through when building a target, such that custom tasks such as preparing dynamically generated source code, verifying build results, etc., can call be done as part of Xcode’s standard build routine.

A problem you might run into is that a long-running script phase can be a real drag to wait through every single time you build. You can work around this problem in a few ways, depending on what makes sense for your project. Two of the simplest options are:

  1. Check the box to run the script only “when installing.”
  2. This is particularly handy if the stuff that’s happening in the build phase really doesn’t need to be there until the final release build, or if you are willing to manually perform the steps during development.

  3. Add logic to your build phase script to detect the build configuration, and either perform a more expedient version of the task, or skip it altogether. For example, a build phase that does laborious profiling of your finished product may not need to be done on “Debug” builds, so you could add a clause to the script:
    if [ ${CONFIGURATION} == Profiling ] ; then
    	echo "Running a very long profiling task!"
    	...
    	echo "Finished running a very long profiling task!"
    else
    	echo "Skipping long profiling task! Whoo!"
    fi
    

    (Note: you don’t have to use bash for your shell script phases. In fact, you can run whatever interpreter you like. I typically use Python, but used bash here as a canonical example).

These tricks work out fine when a script phase is clearly only needed under special circumstances, but what about script phases that have to be done every time you build, rely upon files that may change over time, and take a considerable amount of time to finish? For this we can take advantage of another nuanced feature of Xcode script phases, which is the ability to specify arbitrary input and output files for the script. I think it’s time for an illustrative screenshot:

Screenshot of a configured Xcode script phase

Here’s the low down on the impact of specifying input and output files with script phases in Xcode:

  1. Lack of modification to any of the listed input files encourages Xcode not to run the script phase. Hooray! Fastness!
  2. Non-existence of any listed output file compels Xcode to run your script phase.
  3. The number of input and output file paths is passed to the script as ${SCRIPT_INPUT_FILE_COUNT} and ${SCRIPT_OUTPUT_FILE_COUNT} environment variables.
  4. Each input and output path is passed as e.g. ${SCRIPT_INPUT_FILE_0}, ${SCRIPT_OUTPUT_FILE_1}, etc.

In practice, what does this mean when you go looking to speed up your script phase? It means you should:

  1. List as an input every file or folder that may affect the results of your script phase.
  2. List at least one output, even if your script doesn’t leave any reliable artifacts.

One frustrating bug I should point out here is that Xcode (as of at least Xcode 6.0 and including 6.2 betas) is not as attentive as it should be about changes to the the input and output file lists. If you make changes to these lists, rebuild several times, and don’t see the efficiencies you expect being applied, you should close and reopen your Xcode project document. It seems to cache its notion about script phase dependencies, and will stubbornly stick to those rules until forced to re-evaluate them from scratch. I reported this to Apple as Radar #19233769.

Referring back to the screenshot above, you can that in this contrived example I have listed two input “files,” but in this case they are actually directories. This is to illustrate that if you list a directory, Xcode will trigger a re-running of your script phase whenever any shallow change occurs in that directory. For example, if I add, delete, or modify any files in ImportantStuff”, the script will run on the next build. However, if I modify a file within “ImportantStuff/Goodies”, it will not trigger the script to run because Xcode does not monitor for changes recursively.

You will also see that I’ve gone to the trouble of artificially adding a bogus file to the derived files folder, indicating the script has run. That has the effect of causing a “clean” of the project to wipe out the artificial file and thus cause the script phase to run again even though none of the input files may have changed. If I wanted to ensure that the script phase is skipped as aggressively as possible, I could provide e.g. a path to an output file that is guaranteed to exist, such as a stable file in my project like “$(SRCROOT)main.m”. Because the designation “Output File” in this case is only a hint to the Xcode build system, you don’t have to worry (and can’t expect) that the file will be created or altered unless you do so yourself in the script. This feels a little dodgy to me though, because Apple could choose to change the behavior in the future to e.g. imply that “clean” should delete all listed output files for a script phase.

Script build phases are a woefully under-documented, incredibly useful component of the Xcode build system. They are especially useful when they run blazingly fast or are skipped completely if not needed. I hope this information gives you the resources you need to take full advantage of them.

View Bridge Logging

One of the bits of magic associated with app extensions is that when for example a Share extension’s UI is presented in the context of host application, it behaves as though it were hooked into the UI of the app itself. Standard menu item command such as Cut, Copy, Paste, etc., are all mapped through to the extension’s UI so that standard editing commands work as expected.

But the app extension itself is actually hosted in a separate process. How does all this magic work? On the Mac at least, when the extension’s user interface is displayed, a private framework from the system called ViewBridge.framework seems to be in charge of displaying the view and coordinating communication between it and the host app.

I was trying to figure out why some specific keystrokes did not seem to be making it to my app extension, and while poking around in the debugger I noticed that the ViewBridge framework is riddled with logging messages that are, by default, largely disabled. With a little detective work I was able to figure out how to turn them on.

The long and short of it is that, Apple’s ViewBridge framework looks for an undocumented NSUserDefaults key, “ViewBridgeLogging”. The key can be used to activate, by name, any of a slew of different logging “domains,” which compel the framework to dump copious information about topics ranging from accessibility, to events, to window animations.

Two of these domains, “communications_failure” and “exceptions” are always on, so you will see console logging from these categories should the need arise. The easiest way to coax ViewBridge to dump a massive amount of information for all the other domains is to simply set the NSUserDefaults key globally from the command line:

defaults write -g ViewBridgeLogging -bool YES

Now, when you invoke and interact with your own app extension UI, you’ll see a bunch of logging messages like this:

12/2/14 11:00:30.798 AM MarsEdit Shuttle[83129]:
	<NSViewServiceMarshal: 0x7fc43af09070>
	sending key event to <NSWindow: 0x6000001ecc00>:
	NSEvent: type=FlagsChanged loc=(135,-19) time=226109.1
	flags=0x100 win=0x0 winNum=13244 ctxt=0x0 keyCode=55

This could be handy if you’re trying to work out the particulars of why or if a particular event is even reaching your extension. In fact the vast number of logging messages have often been carefully crafted to provide specific information that could be useful if you’re confused about an edge case. Here’s a more verbose one:

12/2/14 3:11:30.709 PM MarsEdit Shuttle[87440]: 
	<NSViewServiceMarshal: 0x7febfad00b30>
	choosing not to make <NSWindow: 0x6180001eea00> resign
	key because it already believes itself to lack keyness

Yet more examples of pithy prose you’ll find among the console log messages:

"activated TSM because service window became key while remote view is first responder"
"incremented TSM activation count to 1"
"told app it acquired key focus"

Even some particularly juicy language like “discarded toxic NSEvent.” Intriguing. Tell me more!

It’s worth mentioning that the ViewBridge seems to be responsible for managing more than just the UI for app extensions. For example if you leave this console logging enabled while you bring up a standard save panel from TextEdit, you’ll see a massive number of messages relating to the sandboxed file chooser’s behaviors.

It could all become pretty overwhelming, so if you want to limit the kinds of logs that make it to the system console, you can change the NSUserDefaults value from a blunt “YES” to a dictionary representation of the subset of domains you want to activate. As I said before, I believe the “exceptions” and “communications_failure” domains are always on, but to get a feel for the other domains you can selectively enable, run this from the command line:

strings - /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ViewBridge.framework/ViewBridge | grep kLogDomain | sort -u

These are the symbolic constant names for the strings, but the actual string values seem to be easily inferred. For example kLogDomain_Events becomes “events”. But to make things even more bullet-proof, just look closely at the messages that appear in the console in “firehose mode,” with all logging messages enabled as above. Each of the logs ends with a hashtag-style marker indicating the domain of the incident. For example, if the types of logging messages you’re interested in all end with #events or #miscellany, just change the global logging default to show only those varieties by adjusting the default like this:

default write -g ViewBridgeLogging -dict events 1 miscellany 1

Now you know a whole lot about how to learn a whole lot about what goes on when Apple’s ViewBridge framework is in charge of managing a view. Here’s hoping this makes the task of debugging particular behaviors of your app extension’s UI more palatable.

Share Extension Iterations

One of the many big surprises at WWDC this year was the news that iOS 8 and Mac OS X 10.10 would support app extensions, which give developers a variety of new ways in which data and services can be shared between apps.

One of these new types of extension, called a Share extension, essentially allows apps that generate user data provide content to apps that publish user data. As a developer whose main app, MarsEdit, is a blog-publishing tool for the Mac, you can imagine how this might be of interest to me.

The first thing I noticed upon digging into app extension development is that it’s fairly fiddly to get set up, and the default build, run, invoke iteration loop is fraught with administrative overhead.

First of all, when you add a Share extension target to an existing project, you’ll discover that the new target can’t be run directly. To test or debug it, you have to invoke the Share extension from some app that supports … sharing. There are many default apps on the Mac and iOS that support sharing data of various formats. For example on Mac OS X the system Preview app makes a canonical sharing source for photo data, while the Notes app is one of many suitable test apps for sharing text. If you don’t do anything special after adding a Share extension target to your project, the auto-generated Xcode scheme will be configured to ask every time you run:

ChooseAnApp

This will get old fast, and 99% of the time what you’ll want to run is exactly the same dang app you just ran. Luckily, this is easily addressed in the scheme settings, where you can change the “Executable” selection in the “Info” section of the “Run” tab from “Ask on Launch” to a specific application of your choosing.

OtherApp

That’s all well and good, but you still have to go through the tedious task of selecting some suitable content in the target app, clicking the share button, and choosing your extension from the list, before you even have the luxury of examining your own code’s behavior.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could make changes to your app extension’s appearance or behavior, click Run, and moments later be looking at your Share extension’s UI without having to do anything else? Good news: you can, and I’m about to explain how to achieve it for both Mac and iOS targets.

Automatic Invocation

The problem with all the targets on your Mac or iOS that may or may not support sharing pertinent data to your extension, is you have to walk them through the process of invoking you. When you’re deep into the development of a particular aspect of the user interface or mechanical behavior of your extension, what you really want is to repeatedly invoke the extension with the same, predictable kinds of data. Luckily, it’s possible on both Mac and iOS platforms for a host app to invoke sharing extensions programmatically, so you just need to choose a Run target that will predictably invoke your extension upon launching.

The only way I know to guarantee this is to write your own code that invokes the extension, and put it in a custom debugging-purposed target, or else put it into your main app as conditional code that only runs when building Debug variants and when prompted to take effect. I can imagine a sophisticated version of this approach involving a multi-faceted extension-debugging target that would be capable of fast-tracking extension invocation for a variety of data formats. But for the simplest solution, I recommend adding the ability to invoke your extension to the very app that hosts it. Then your simple test mode behavior will always coexist in the same source base as your extension code.

The way I approached this was to add an environment variable, “RSDebugAppExtension” to the scheme configuration for my app extension, which is also configured now to target the main app as its Executable target. So when I build and run the app extension scheme, may main app runs with these environment variables set:

Screenshot 11 24 14 3 12 PM

Now in the main app’s applicationDidFinishLaunching: method, I just have to add the appropriate code for invoking the app extension’s UI. Without the platform-specific voodoo, it looks something like this:

#if DEBUG
	// Check for flag to invoke app extension
	NSDictionary* env = [[NSProcessInfo processInfo] environment];
	NSString* appExtensionDebug = [env objectForKey:@"RSDebugAppExtension"];
	if (appExtensionDebug != nil)
	{
		// RUN MY EXTENSION
	}
#endif

The #if DEBUG just ensures that I will never inadvertenly ship this code in a release version of my app. The environment variable ensures I won’t be plagued by my extension’s UI appearing whenever I’m working on other aspects of my app besides the extension.

Now we just have to dig into the specifics of how to “RUN MY EXTENSION.” I’ll show you how that works for both Mac and iOS based Share extensions.

Invoking a Mac-based Share Extension

If you’re working on a Mac-based Share extension, the key to invoking it at runtime is to enlist the help of the NSSharingService infrastructure. You simply ask it for a service with your identifier, and ask it to “perform.”

NSString* serviceName = @"com.red-sweater.yeehaw";
NSSharingService* myService = [NSSharingService sharingServiceNamed:serviceName];
[myService performWithItems:@[@"Hello world"]];

Now when I build and run with the aforementioned environment variable set up, it pops up my Share extension, pre-populated with the text “Hello world.”

Invoking an iOS-based Share Extension

Unfortunately, iOS doesn’t support the same NSSharingService infrastructure that the Mac has. This seems like an area where we might be lucky to see more unification over the years, but for the time being the iOS notion of a sharing service is tied up with the existing “Social.framework” and its SLComposeViewController class. This is the interface that is supposed to be used to invoke a sharing panel for Facebook, Twitter, Tencent Weibo, etc. And luckily, although I don’t believe it’s documented, you can also pass in the extension identifier for your custom Share extension to instantiate a suitable view controller for hosting your extension:

NSString* serviceName = @"com.red-sweater.yeehaw";
SLComposeViewController* myController = [SLComposeViewController composeViewControllerForServiceType:serviceName];
[myController setInitialText:@"Hello World"];
[[self navigationController] presentViewController:myController animated:YES completion:nil];

You can see the basic gist of it is similar to the Mac, but you have to configure the view controller directly as opposed to providing a list of arbitrary input values. Also bear in mind that because the iOS-based solution above relies upon [self navigationController] being non-nil, you’ll need to add the special debugging code at a point in your app’s launch process when this is already set up, or else find another way of ensuring you can meaningfully present view controllers to your app’s main window.

Going Further

Notice that I hinge all the invocation on simply whether the RSDebugAppExtension environment variable is non-nil. Basically while I’m debugging I have to go in and change the code in applicationDidFinishLaunching to invoke the extension in the way I want. This works OK for me at least at this stage, but I can imagine down the road wanting to be able to fine-tune the behavior of how the extension is invoked. For this purpose, why not encode into the value of the environment variable itself certain clues about how to invoke the extension? It could specify for example what text should be passed the extension, or other configuration as desired.

My intent in sharing this blog post is both to point out some potentially time-saving tricks that will help those of you developing Share app extensions, but also to encourage you to look for creative ways to cut out the tedious aspects of whatever you work on. When all is said and done, the few monotonous steps during each iteration of work on a Share extension probably don’t add up to all that much in sheer time, but they take a lot of the joy and immediacy out of development, which frankly puts me in a bad mood. Clicking Run and seeing my work, including my latest changes, pop up instantly on the screen makes me feel a lot happier about my job.

Coding Under Par

Brent Simmons reflects on his ambition to stop coding “late at night”:

I may think I’m adding productive hours to my day – but I’m not. I’m writing bugs, or, at best, not the best code I could be writing. And I pay for it later.

I read Brent’s piece with a lot of nodding my own head. I find late night coding perhaps more alluring than ever because as a husband and father of two, who happens to work from home, much of my daytime development time is compromised by commitments to family, distractions, or even just the knowledge that whatever I’m working on now has a firm and fixed stopping time.

I suppose the same is true late at night, but when it’s midnight and I’m on a perceived roll with some coding challenge, there doesn’t appear to be any stopping me. I “have all night,” or at least that’s what my monkey brain says. Of course, the smarter half of me knows I should be getting calling it a day and getting some much-needed rest.

The next morning, I usually realize that whatever challenge was tantalizing me into the wee hours was in fact a 15 minute problem that I could have, should have, put off until I was more capable.

I think Brent’s observation about the perils of late-night coding are a special case of a larger problem: your best work will come at unpredictable times. As a rule, we probably won’t do our best work at midnight, but there will be mornings when 9AM is not the best time for cranking out code, either. I have often made, and continue making the mistake of assuming that productivity in software development is directly related to time. It’s not. Any of us with a history of working in code has memories of those “weird days” where weeks of work seemed to vanish under the inspired direction of 4 hours “working in the zone.”

I don’t know how to get in the zone reliably, but I am learning to recognize that when I’m not there, it’s not worth pushing it. If you’re banging away at the keyboard and nothing seems to be working as well as it should, maybe it’s time to go to sleep, go for a run, go to a museum, get lunch with a friend, you get the idea. Maybe it’s time to do anything but endeavor to write code as well as you do when you’re at your best.

Transplanting Constraints

Over the past few months I have become quite taken by Auto Layout, Apple’s powerful layout specification framework for Mac and iOS.

For the past few years I’ve heard both that Auto Layout is brilliant and that it has a frustrating learning curve. I can now attest that both of these are true.

One of the problems people have complained most about with respect to Auto Layout is the extent to which Xcode’s Interface Builder falls short in providing assistance specifying constraints. As many people have noticed, Apple is addressing these complaints slowly but surely. Xcode 5’s UI for adding constraints and debugging layout issues is dramatically superior to the functionality in Xcode 4.

Still, there is much room for improvement.

One frustrating behavior arises when one deigns to move a large number of views from one position in a view hierarchy to another. For example, the simple and common task of collecting a number of views and embedding them in a new superview. This task is so common that Apple provides a variety of helpful tools under Editor -> Embed In to streamline the task.

Here’s the big downer with respect to constraints: whenever you move a view from one superview to another, all of the constraints attached to the old superview, constraints that you may have laboriously fine-tuned over hours or days, simply disappear. Poof!

This isn’t such a big deal when your constraints happen to match what Interface Builder suggests for you. But even very simple interfaces may have a fairly large number of constraints. Consider this contrived example, in which three buttons are arranged to roughly share the width of a container view:

SimpleButtons 1

Nine constraints, and the removal or misconfiguration of any one will lead to incorrect layout in my app. Yet simply embedding the views in a custom view wipes them all out:

TestView2 xib 1

This problem is bad enough in the contrived scenario about, but in my much more complicated interfaces, a collection of views might comprise 50 or more customized constraints. Here’s a “simple” subsection of MarsEdit’s post editor side panel:

ServerOptions

Having to piece those all together again just because I want to rearrange some views, well it makes me mad. And when I get mad? I get … innovative!

A Pattern For Transplanting Constraints

Thanks to recent changes in Interface Builder’s file-format for xib files, it’s more straight-forward than ever to hand-tune the contents of a xib file outside of Xcode. It should go without saying that in doing so, you take your fate into your hands, etc., etc. But if you’re anything like me, a little hand-editing in BBEdit is worth the risk if it saves hours of much more intricate hand-editing back in Interface Builder. You’ll save valuable time and also reduce the very real risk of missing some nuanced detail as you try to reimplement everything by hand.

So without further ado, here are steps you can follow to transplant a set of views in a xib file such that the constraints from the old view follow over to the new view:

  1. Make a backup of your .xib file. You’re going to screw this up at least once, so you’ll want something “sane” to fall back on when you do.
  2. In Interface Builder, create the parent view if it doesn’t exist already. Give it a real obvious name like “New Parent View” so you’ll be able to spot it later:

    NewParentView xib

  3. Save changes in IB to make sure the .xib file is up-to-date.
  4. Open the .xib file in a text editor such as BBEdit, or right-click the file in Xcode and select Edit As -> Source Code to edit as text right in Xcode.
  5. Locate the new parent view by searching on the name you gave it. For example, in my sample project the view looks like this in the text file:
    <customView ... id="5M5-9Q-zMt" userLabel="New Parent View">
    ...
    </customView>
  6. Locate the old parent view. If you have trouble, you may want to give it a custom name as well before saving again in IB. In my trivial example, the old parent is the first and only top-level view in the xib file, so it looks like this:
    <customView id="1">
    ...
    </customView>
    
  7. Take note of the id for the old parent view and the new parent view. We’re going to need these in a minute to tie up some loose ends.
  8. Locate the constraints from the old parent view, cut them, and paste them into the new parent view’s XML content. Again in my case it’s trivial because I want all the constraints from the old parent view. I cut them out of the old and into the new so things looks something like this:
    <customView ... id="5M5-9Q-zMt" userLabel="New Parent View">
            ...
            <constraints>
                    <constraint firstItem="rfg-hN-1Il" firstAttribute="leading" secondItem="1" secondAttribute="leading" constant="20" symbolic="YES" id="LOu-nX-awU"/>
                    <constraint firstItem="8Ju-hM-RbA" firstAttribute="baseline" secondItem="Sgd-MR-FMw" secondAttribute="baseline" id="Mwc-6y-uaP"/>
                    ...
            </constraints>
    </customView>
    
  9. Locate the subviews themselves from the old parent view, and cut and paste them in the same way, making sure they reside in a <subviews> node in the new parent view. You should now have a new parent view whose xml topology looks something like this:
    <customView ... id="5M5-9Q-zMt" userLabel="New Parent View">
    	<rect ... />
    	<autoresizingMask ... />
    	<subviews>
    		... your transplanted subviews here ...
    	</subviews>
    	<constraints>
    		... your transplanted constraints here ...
    	</constraints>
    </customView>
    

    We’re close! But not quite finished. If you save and try to use the .xib now, you’ll find that Interface Builder rejects it as corrupted. What’s wrong? The constraints we transplanted mostly reference only the other views that we transplanted, but some of them also reference the old parent view.. To fix the integrity of these constraints, we need to update them to reference the new parent view instead.

  10. Refer back to the Interface Builder “id” values you noted in step 7. We need to locate any reference to the old parent view and adjust it so it references the new parent view. In our example, the old parent view id is “1” and the new parent view id is “5M5-9Q-zMt”. Specifically, we’re looking for attributes on our transplanted constraints where the “firstItem” or “secondItem” references the old parent ID:
    <constraint firstItem="rfg-hN-1Il" firstAttribute="leading" secondItem="1" secondAttribute="leading" constant="20" symbolic="YES" id="LOu-nX-awU"/>
    

    Change the value secondItem=”1″ to secondItem=”5M5-9Q-zMt”, and repeat for any other instances where the old parent view is referenced.

  11. Save the text-formatted .xib file, cross your fingers, and hope you didn’t make any mistakes.
  12. Reopen the .xib file in Interface Builder, or if you’re already in Xcode’s text editor, right-click the file and select Open As -> Interface Builder.

If your combination of luck and skill paid off as planned, then you’ll see something beautiful like this:

TestView xib

All of my views, now situated within the new parent view, and the desired constraints in-tact.

I hope this helps serve as a specific reference for folks in the same boat as I am in, wanting to shuffle views around without losing the hard work I’ve put into my constraints. And I hope it also serves to inspire you to think beyond the limitations of our tools. As great as Xcode, Interface Builder, and a host of other essential technologies are, they often fall short of desired behavior. When they do, it’s often in our power to work around the issues and carry on developing software as effectively as we know how.