Question

I’m new to iOS development, and having trouble identifying the source of a SIGABRT. I’ve narrowed it down to something that happens during initialization of a UIViewController subclass, specifically between its loadView and viewDidLoad methods.

I narrowed it down with an NSLog call in each of those method overloads in my UIViewController subclass. However, I’m unable to get any more granularity from the debugger; I can’t step into the [super loadView] method. Are there any techniques for debugging a SIGABRT other than NSLogs and stepping through with the debugger? Is there any way to see exactly from where the exception was thrown?

Program-specific details

This program uses Core Data; I created it following this tutorial. I believe the SIGABRT started happening after I ran through the “Relationships In Action” section, and was not happening before (I think I had a successful build at the end of the preceding section). Specifically, I can successfully add a Person, but PersonDetailTableViewController throws a SIGABRT between loadView and viewDidLoad.

I’ve tried deleting the app from the iPhone simulator, and also running a Product > Clean; neither had any effect.

Answer 1

Found the culprit. I had earlier incorrectly created an IBOutlet by ctrl+dragging from a Table View Cell‘s Text Field into my UITableViewController subclass. I manually deleted the code this created, but a connection remained in the Connections Inspector. Deleting that connection solved the problem — no more SIGABRT.

It’s unfortunate that Xcode sees the problem (see the exclamation mark in the attached image), but didn’t tell me about it in any way except the mysterious SIGABRT….