INLConfig

1. Overview

INLConfig is an iOS library for loading your configuration from a plist. Its goal is to have an easily maintainable configuration (by replacing things like global constants with a plist) without sacrificing productivity. After you add an item to the plist, you can start using it with autocomplete without doing any further configuration. This is achieved by a script that generates supporting code. The library also supports remote updates.

The library contains the INLConfig class that extracts your configuration from the plist and the genconfig script generates INLConfig categories/extensions for easy access to the items in the plist.

2. Setup

First, add a plist configuration file.

To enable code generation add a new Run script build phase. For each of your configuration plists run the genconfig script with two parameters: 1. the name of the configuration file without the .plist extension, 2. the programming language that should be generated (--objC and --swift are supported)

./Pods/INLConfig/genconfig SampleConfig --objC
./Pods/INLConfig/genconfig AnotherConfig --swift

After you build the project (cmd+B) a finder window will open with the created configuration files. Drag them into Xcode. You can even move them into a different directory as long as it’s a subdirectory of the project source directory. In this case the script will not create new files but update the existing ones.

Note: Do not modify the code in the generated files because it will be overwritten when the script is run again

You can now use the configuration in your code

// swift file, swift config
INLConfig.sampleConfig.sampleString
INLConfig.sampleNumber

// swift file, objC config
INLConfig.sampleConfig().sampleString()
INLConfig.sampleNumber()

// objC file
[[INLConfig sampleConfig] sampleString];
[INLConfig sampleNumber];

3. Remote configuration update

The configuration can be updated to a newer version if the configuration file specifies the INLMeta dictionary. The dictionary should contain a “config” attribute containing an url for the configuration file and optionally a “version” attribute containing a url for a version file.

<key>INLMeta</key>
<dict>
	<key>config</key>
	<string>https://an.url/SampleConfig.plist</string>
	<key>version</key>
	<string>https://an.url/version.txt</string>
</dict>

The update is triggered by calling updateConfig()

INLConfig.sampleConfig.updateConfig {
	// update successful
}