Storyboards and SVN conflicts

Question

This is a problem we never had to deal with until storyboards were introduced - Whenever there was a chance of conflict in UI, we just made sure that no 2 developers ever worked on the same XIB file simultaneously. The reason we refrained from resolving XIB conflicts is that there may be problematic side-effects (XIB is represented in XML format so there isn't a "good" way to merge 2 versions).

Now we are facing this issue because all of our UI elements are within the same .storyboard file - prevention of simultaneous work on any 2 UI elements in the project makes working in parallel very difficult.

Any suggestions as to how to tackle this issue? Thanks in advance for your efforts.

Answer 1

Break up your storyboard into multiple storyboards.

There is no reason for your app to contain only one storyboard. Break your storyboard up into module storyboards. You can use +storyboardWithName:bundle: to load storyboard modules.

See: UIStoryboard Best Practices for other good storyboard ideas.

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Update

It's important to note this is not a complete solution to the problem. In the same way you cannot completely avoid the possibility of merge conflicts in source code decomposing a giant class into smaller modules, you can't avoid the possibility storyboard merge conflicts either. The idea is to reduce the likelihood until it becomes a manageable problem.

There will alway be tricky merge situations in a large codebase. A properly decomposed solution will reduce the number of conflicts and minimize the number of lock out needed.