If you’re like me, you often make promises to yourself in the form of TODO comments in your code. For example:
// TODO: make sure file exists before opening!
fooBar = [[FooBar alloc] initWithFile:path];
This is a reasonable thing to do, because sometimes you just want to get something working right now and aren’t in the mood to write all the required error checking code. But, you also know that you cannot trust your soft human brain to remember to add the check later, so you write a comment to remind yourself to do it.
Xcode recognizes the TODO: keyword in your comments and helpfully adds items to the function popup menu so that you can quickly navigate to them. In addition to TODO:, Xcode will also recognize FIXME: (when you know the code is broken), ???: (when you don’t know what it does), and !!!: (when you wish you didn’t know).
That’s helpful when you’re editing a file, but what about a TODO tucked away in some dark corner of your source code that you haven’t visited in a while? You’re likely to forget about it, and how can you keep a promise you forgot that you made?
The answer, of course, is to have somebody nag you. Fortunately, there’s a way to have Xcode fill that role. All you have to do is add a simple Run Script Build Phase which turns them into Build Warnings.
Select Project > New Build Phase > New Run Script Build Phase from the menu bar. Then, copy and paste this into the script window:
KEYWORDS="TODO:|FIXME:|\?\?\?:|\!\!\!:"
find ${SRCROOT} \( -name "*.h" -or -name "*.m" \) -print0 | \
xargs -0 egrep --with-filename --line-number --only-matching "($KEYWORDS).*\$" | \
perl -p -e "s/($KEYWORDS)/ warning: \$1/"
What does it mean?
Line 1 defines the keywords we want to search for. If you want to exclude a keyword or include a different one, edit this line.
Line 2 uses the find command to generate a list of all files in your project directory (SRCROOT) having an .h or .m extension. If you want to search more files, you will need to edit this line.
Line 3 uses xargs to pass those file names along to egrep, which searches inside the files for lines containing one of the keywords. If any are found, it outputs the file name, line number, and the matching part of the line.
Line 4 uses Perl to format the lines as warnings.
The output of the script will look like this:
/Users/benzado/Projects/FooBart/Baz.m:42: warning: TODO: make sure file exists before opening!
Xcode will recognize lines in this format and treat them as first class build warnings. You can see them in the Build Results panel and, just like a warning from the compiler, a double click will open an editor window and take you directly to the offending line.
An Exercise For The Enterprising Reader: modify the script so that no warnings or errors are reported during Debug builds, but TODOs are flagged as errors in Release builds.