It’s been more than three years, but I’m finally updating my most popular app, Qur’an Memorizer. This is the first in a series of blog posts tagged with QMUpgrade, where I’ll write about the issues I faced updating an aging app.
The first thing I realized is that I can’t even build the app in XCode 8. Header files can’t be found, valid architectures can’t be found, etc.
I decided to start from scratch and create a new project. I can reuse a lot of the critical animation code, and improve the rest of the code with what I’ve learned over the past few years.
At the most basic level, I chose to stay with Objective-C because there is too much else to change, and I would like to reuse as much code as possible. For testing I’ve decided to use Specta and Expecta and XCode’s native User Interface testing framework.
My coding style has changed a lot over the last few years, along with my adoption of modernizations to Objective-C, so I’m really looking forward to using nullability qualifiers, lightweight generics and kindof types.
My strategy for the the update is as follows: start with the core ‘business’ logic first, and add the user interface later. Aim for 100% coverage of code in the test cases. I don’t know if that’s possible, but we’ll see in the next few weeks.
One of the first issues I ran into is a consequence of my decision to use two sqlite3 databases, one for the domain-level data, and the other for user data (bookmarks, notes, preferences, etc). Over the past few years I’ve started using FMDBMigrationManager along with FMDB to handle the migration of database versions. By default, FMDBMigrationManager looks for sql files in the default bundle and applies them in order. But now, with two databases, I need to partition the sql files so that the two database schemas can be migrated independently. So I needed to create two new bundles, one for the main database, and one for the preference database.
To do this I created two folders named qmSql.bundle and prefsSql.bundle. Each folder has its own set of sql files. Each folder also has its own Info.plist file. Here’s the one for qmSql.bundle:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.euclid.quranmemorizer.sql.qm</string>
</dict>
</plist>
With these bundles included in my app, I thought I would be able to get pointers to them using something like this:
NSBundle * bundle = [NSBundle bundleWithIdentifier:@"com.euclid.quranmemorizer.sql.qm"];
But that didn’t work. Even when I created new targets and added them as dependencies to the main app and test targets, bundle would always be nil.
I got it to work by using the path instead:
NSString *resourceBundlePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"qmSql" ofType:@"bundle"];
NSBundle *bundle = [NSBundle bundleWithPath:resourceBundlePath];
If anyone knows why using the CFBundleIdentifier didn’t work, please let me know.
Well, that’s it for now. I’ll keep posting notes on the rewrite at this blog.