I went to iPhone Tech Talk in Toronto yesterday, and among the many sessions, I attended Michael Jurewitz’ (@jurewitz) session, “Testing and Debugging Your iPhone Application.” He covered a lot of the basics for using Instruments (very similar to last year’s session on that), how to setup provisioning, etc. for Ad-Hoc Beta testing, etc.
He also covered Xcode’s new built in Static Analyzer (Clang), which is incredibly useful and powerful now that it’s a part of Xcode. However, I haven’t been using it that much (he said to use it at least once a week), but he briefly showed that there’s actually a setting in the project’s build settings called “Run Static Analyzer,” which is a checkbox and checking this will run the Static Analyzer every time you build your project. Jurewitz mentioned you could make a duplicate Debug build configuration that is dedicated to running the Static Analyzer.
He went over this very fast, so I think a lot of people missed the benefit of this great tip!
So here’s how you do it:
Open your project settings and go to the Configurations pane. Pick your Debug configuration (or whichever build configuration you want to dedicate to running the Static Analyzer) and hit Duplicate in the bottom of the window. I called mine “Debug with Clang,” so I know it’s my Debug build configuration.
Next, hop into the Build pane and find “Build Options”. Within those options you’ll find the “Run Static Analyzer” option. Check the checkbox and you’re good to go!
Now, every time you build your project using your new “Debug with Clang” it’ll automatically analyze your project. Personally it’ll probably help me remember to run the Static Analyzer way more often on my project, instead of just once in a while.
Keep in mind that running the Static Analyzer increases the time it takes to build your project, so don’t choose that build setting if you’re just testing new code, etc. Also, I find it’s a good idea to “Clean All Targets” once in while, as it seems to ‘reset’ the Static Analyzer, because otherwise I am finding that it tends to miss certain errors on the second, third, fourth, etc. time you build with the “Run Static Analyzer” option on.
