Question

Say i have two libraries “Foo” and “Bar”, compiling as frameworks for OSX and static libraries for IOS.

Library ‘Foo’ depends on library ‘Bar’. I’m using XCode4 workspaces.

In Ascii-art:-

• IOS_App
• ~ Foo.a
• ~ ~ Bar.a

and

• OSX_App
• ~ Foo.framework
• ~ ~ Bar.framework

Must file Foo.m that #imports Bar.h look like this:-

#if TARGET_OS_IPHONE
  #import "Bar.h"
#else
  #import <Bar/Bar.h>
#endif

Or, is there a way, maybe by copying headers when building Bar, and setting Search Paths appropriately, to make

  #import <Bar/Bar.h>

work in both cases?

(I suppose the root of my problem is not properly understanding the difference between #import </> and #import "")

Answer 1

I’ve done this sort of thing extensively, and what I ended up doing was modifying the prefix header for the application/project to import either the specific header file for the library/framework or if the prefix is common between OS X and iOS (such as for the Foo library/framework) adopt the first example in your question.

Then in Foo.m you don’t need to have any #import statements at the top.

So, for example, in the prefix header for Foo.framework have

#if TARGET_OS_IPHONE
  #import "Bar.h"
#else
  #import <Bar/Bar.h>
#endif

and in the prefix header for your Mac OS X application have

#import <Foo/Foo.h>

and for iOS

#import "Foo.h"

Then all you source code, doesn’t need to worry about the headers for any of the classes in your common libraries/frameworks.