Is there an equivalent concept in iOS development to an Android product flavor?

Question

We utilize product flavors in Android to keep the same code under source control, but conditionally target the endpoints to dev/qa/production servers based on the flavor selected. For reference:

http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/build-system-concepts

For example, when we want to test a new endpoint in the "dev" environment we can have a file in src/dev/res/values/endpoints.xml that has an entry that's the XML equivalent of urlbase = https://dev-endpoint.ourserver.com/v3/, and build using the "dev" product flavor to build an APK pointed to our dev environment.

Is there an equivalent concept for iOS development?

Answer 1

Yes. If you select your project in the left bar, then select your Project under Project in the inner left bar, and select Info on the inner top bar, you will see a section labeled Configurations. You can configurations here.

Then select your Target on the inner left bar and select Build Settings on the inner top bar. Search for "preproc" in the search box. Under the Apple LLVM - Preprocessing section, you can add custom Preprocessor Macros. For your configurations, define something like "DEV=1", etc.

Now in your code you can say #if DEV, etc.

Many projects use AFNetworking to talk to their back end. You can set the baseURL for your AFHTTPSessionManager subclass, or whatever, based on the defines.