How to include a bundle in main project xcode 4.1

After searching for a long time and failing many times, I found this resource that has been an absolutely great tutorial to create Static Libraries and include bundles in your main project or even for distribution to 3rd party developers that may consume your library.

Absolutely recommended:

https://github.com/jverkoey/iOS-Framework

Here is how I did it.

1. Drag and drop B.bundle from Project B → Products → B.bundle into the Copy Bundle Resources build phase of your app in Project A (select the Create groups options when asked). This will add B.bundle at the root of your Project A outline. You can move it into the Frameworks directory near Blib.a if it you prefer.

2. Select B.bundle and check its Location in the Identity and Type right panel (Utilities area). By default, Xcode chooses Relative to Project. This is wrong, select Relative to Build Products instead.

3. The path to B.bundle will now look something like ../../../../../../../../Projects/MyApp/B.bundle. This is not what you want, but you can easily fix it. Open ProjectA.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj in a text editor, search for this path and delete everything in it except for B.bundle. Your project.pbxproj should look like this:

   explicitFileType = wrapper.cfbundle; name = B.bundle; path = "B.bundle"; sourceTree = BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR; };
   

4. Save your project.pbxproj file. Xcode will automatically reload your project and your app should build just fine.

In project A, is the product of project B a dependency in your scheme's Build action? I think you might have to set up this dependency (sometimes disabling the automatic dependency discovery option is best) for it to show up and be available for copying into another target. I believe this is because it doesn't really exist (like an image resource file) until it's built and Xcode needs to ensure it's built before working with it from another target.

After long investigation, it came up there's no easy way of doing this. The B.bundle is never visible to A project, and there's no settings in workspace to change that. At this point there are three solutions:

• Include the bundle manually from "copy resources->other", I started with this, but everytime there's a change you have to drop and include the bundle again
• Create a script to be run in build phase, if everything is built into the PRODUCTS dir you can find the bundle easily and having copied automatically into the app.bundle. This is not a bad solution. If you are using svn the script got included in project, and users have it for free without additional work.
• As suggested by Apple tech support, use folder references.Build bundle B into a folder and add such folder to project A using the "Create Folder References for any added folders" option. Xcode 4 will update your bundle into that folder every time you built it. The added folder will appear as blue once included in your project A.

Thats's it, I personally use the script, because this solution is path independent if you use standard xcode reference variable such as BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR and so on, and the shell script is just a cp -r-f

[UPDATE 03/04/2015]

I would like to point out that the question is now 4 years old. At that time there weren't many "official" options available. I even spoke with Apple Tech Support, which proposed solution 3 as the only available solution. It is of course very likely that things are now changed, and there is a much better solution. Just to speak, I also like to add that the three above are not "hacks" but "solutions", maybe technically outdated, but they can still be used nowadays. I intend a "hack" as a..."hack", which means it probably not going to work in future software release.