Professional Xcode® 3

Chapter 5. Sources

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding source item type and reference types

• Editing source item references and attributes

• Learning some strategies for organizing assets in a project

• Creating and adding new source files

• Adding source items for existing files, folders, and frameworks

• Reorganizing a project

You've learned how to create and reorganize projects. Everything you've learned so far has dealt exclusively with the project document. The project document contains its settings, targets, and preferences, but it doesn't contain any of the assets — files and folders — that will be used to build the project. All of your project's assets, essentially everything to which your project needs to refer, are defined and organized in the project source group. Each item in the source group contains a reference to an actual file or folder in the filesystem.

The most important concept to keep in mind while you're working with source items is this: Every item in the project group is a reference to a real file or folder. There are different kinds of source items and there are different kinds of references. Just to make things interesting, source items can refer to other source items, creating references to references.

Source item references in Xcode are very flexible, affording you a great deal of latitude to organize your source files and projects in just about any way imaginable. The number of possible combinations, however, can potentially create a lot of confusion and indiscriminately ...