Question

I am having some difficulty creating a bundle for my application, and placing files in the bundle.

For example, Facebook has developed a bundle for iPhone applications using their framework. In the same way, I also want to create a bundle which can be reused for many applications.

My questions are:

• what steps should I follow to create a bundle for any kind of application?
• what should be taken care while creating a bundle?

Answer 1

First of all, since your question is tagged iPhone, you can only include code in your bundles on the iPhone. So basically you can only use bundles to package up pictures and sound files and other static data.

When you create a new project in XCode, there is an option to make the target a bundle (under Framework & Library), but an assets bundle is just a directory with a .bundle suffix. I generate mine with this little script:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Building assets bundle."
if [ -d ./MyAssets.bundle ]; then
   rm ./MyAssets.bundle/*
else
   mkdir ./MyAssets.bundle
fi
find ./assets -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -J% cp % ./MyAssets.bundle

(I’m no bash hacker, so this can probably be improved in countless ways. Suggestions welcome!)

This takes a folder hierarchy and flattens it (I detest hierarchies) into a single directory which is named MyAssets.bundle. I trigger this script from a separate build phase when in projects that import the bundle, so that changes are automatically tracked.

If you want to learn how to create framework bundles, it’s a bit more complicated (you have to follow certain conventions and include info in plists), but for iPhone bundles, this is pretty much all you will need to know and do.