Making project references

[gregersn]

I am trying to recreate a React-Native project with XcodeGen, and I must admit that it feels like a "one step forward, two steps back" kind of deal to understand xcode project files.

But, I have come to understand, from looking at the project file I have, that I need to make some "projectReferences", but I can't seem to figure out how to spec that.

In the project file I have, the section looks something like this:

projectReferences = (
				{
					ProductGroup = 00C302A81ABCB8CE00DB3ED1 /* Products */;
					ProjectRef = 00C302A71ABCB8CE00DB3ED1 /* RCTActionSheet.xcodeproj */;
				},
				{
					ProductGroup = 5E91572E1DD0AC6500FF2AA8 /* Products */;
					ProjectRef = 5E91572D1DD0AC6500FF2AA8 /* RCTAnimation.xcodeproj */;
				},

/* Begin PBXGroup section */
		00C302A81ABCB8CE00DB3ED1 /* Products */ = {
			isa = PBXGroup;
			children = (
				00C302AC1ABCB8CE00DB3ED1 /* libRCTActionSheet.a */,
			);
			name = Products;
			sourceTree = "<group>";
		};

		00C302A71ABCB8CE00DB3ED1 /* RCTActionSheet.xcodeproj */ = {isa = PBXFileReference; lastKnownFileType = "wrapper.pb-project"; name = RCTActionSheet.xcodeproj; path = "../node_modules/react-native/Libraries/ActionSheetIOS/RCTActionSheet.xcodeproj"; sourceTree = "<group>"; };

Is this possible to do? Or am I misunderstanding something?

[gregersn]

I see that there are functions to handle it in xcodeproj, so it might not be implemented in XcodeGen?

https://github.com/tuist/xcodeproj/blob/7a32fa0ebf0c6120ed8a7de03a632c2a10bbe243/Sources/xcodeproj/Objects/Project/PBXProject.swift#L64

[yonaskolb]

Hi @gregersn.
Currently XcodeGen lacks multi-project support, though that is on the horizon

[brennanMKE]

I am looking to add support for projectReferences right now as it the only functionality missing from XcodeGen which I really need. I've prepared a local project and created commits from each step in adding a project reference as well as the target dependency.

These are the steps as I see the changes in the Git history.

1. adding a group named Dependencies (not associated with a directory)
2. adding project to projectReferences (changes in PBXContainerItemProxy, PBXFileReference and PBXReferenceProxy)
3. add target dependency (changes in PBXContainerItemProxy and PBXTargetDependency)

I am not familiar with the code but it appears to be set up logically. I will see what I can do and if I get it into a good state I will create a PR.

[brennanMKE]

I prepared a sample project which tries going down both paths. First on master there is the sub-projects approach which adds project references. I am seeing a lot of changes are done in the project files when the references are added. Alternatively, there is the workspace branch which simply brings all of the projects into a workspace and uses a Build Scheme to control the build so that the dependencies are build and then later found implicitly. It appears that working with workspaces would be a better option, though I will have to be careful about how the Build Scheme is under the folder for the generated Xcode project. If I have to I will adjust the shell script used for this build to replace the Build Scheme file as needed. All I really need is to get the Xcode project to include sources files which are also generated.

• AtomicXcodeGenSample

[niksawtschuk]

@brennanMKE @yonaskolb Have either of you had any success with this? I'd love to adopt xcodegen for a React Native app I'm working on.

[gregersn]

I ended up doing something like this:

library_group = project.get_or_create_group("Libraries")
project_file_options = FileOptions(weak=False, embed_framework=True, create_build_files=True)

project.add_project("../node_modules/react-native/someproject/ios/afile.xcodeproj,
                            parent=library_group, 
                            target_name="Whateveryourtargetname is",
                            force=False,
                            file_options=project_file_options,)