Sharing classes between projects in xcode/objective-c
I've got a client<=>server app I'm building for Mac OS X, using Objective-c/Cocoa and xCode. I've created a different project for both the apps I have, and I'm wondering the best way to share classes between them. There are several classes I've made that would be useful to both. This far I've been copying them around, but I feel like this isn't the best solution.
How do I share classes effectively? Should I redo it as 1 project and just have two build targets? How do I do this?
Any other info?
Thanks.
Answer
If you have two or more products that are going to share a good amount of common code, like a suite of products, you might want to consider creating just a single xcode project, and then add a different target for each product that will be built from both shared and product-specific code. With a lot of shared code, a client/server pair of products would possibly be great candidates for going this way.
Boiled-down, the basic deal is that for each target in your xcode project that you want to build, you specify which files should be used to build it: source files, art, xibs, and so on. This way, for example, you can setup your client product to be built using files A,B,C,D,E,F, and your server product to be built using files A,F,X,Y,Z.
I really like having every related product living under a single xcode project "roof", because you wont have to jump around xcode projects, and it really simplifies SCM management for the shared files.
Here's a link to Apple's docs on this: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#featuredarticles/XcodeConcepts/Concept-Targets.html
Update: there's a little bit of extra hassle involved when it comes to configuring target-specific header files in xcode (it's always something...right?!); for example, use "myHeaderA.h" for this target and "myHeaderB.h" for that target. Here's a great post that shares how to do it: controlling which project header file Xcode will include. Caution: after you set things up this way, xcode no longer knows any paths to search for any of your target header files, so you have to set them up manually. To do this, right-click Get Info on your target, select Build category, then add your paths via the "Header Search Paths" setting. The paths are searched in the order that you enter them.