Question

I used to have a class called Constants. In it was this typedef:

typedef enum visible_thing {

    BACKGROUND,
    BACKGROUND_COLOR,
    MAIN_WINDOW

} VISIBLE_THING;

And my, was life rosy! I was importing ‘Constants.h` wherever I needed to access this type, and it all worked.

Then I decided to nuke the Constants class. I took the typedef and I put it in another class, for clarity let’s call it OtherClass. I went through and changed all the imports of Constants.h to imports of OtherClass.h That’s all I did, I didn’t touch any other code. And now the whole thing’s broke!

Methods that worked perfectly with Constants now give me this error: Parse Issue - Expected a type. What the heck? I sure hope someone has some leads on this!

Update: frustratingly, this is one of those problems that just seemed to go away on its own without explanation. I answered my own question, below, with a workaround I’d found that entailed #import-ing the same header multiple times in one file. But today I removed the extra #import, and everything still worked. Arg. Computers!

Answer 1

The class that was generating the errors had two other class definitions inside it, helper classes that were only used internally. Apparently that was the root of the problem.

What I didn’t know was that if you do that, if there is more than one class in a file, you may need to import the same header multiple times.

Here’s what I did to fix it. I changed this:

#import "OtherClass.h"

@interface InnerClass

// uses typedef from OtherClass

@end



@interface MainClass

// uses typedef from OtherClass

@end

To this:

#import "OtherClass.h"

@interface InnerClass

// uses typedef from OtherClass

@end

#import "OtherClass.h" //<--without this, MainClass won't recognize the typedef 

@interface MainClass

// uses typedef from OtherClass

@end

Which seems clunky and like I may be doing something else wrong, but at least it fixed the issue at hand. Any follow-up comments will be appreciated.