Deploying Test Resources in the iPhone Simulator

Question

I am working on an iPhone Application that stores images in the Applications 'Document' folder.

I am currently doing the majority of my testing using the iPhone Simulator. In order to aid development I want to have some test images pre-loaded into the Document folder of the application that my application can access and display.

I have discovered that when running the application in the iPhone simulator you can access the applications file system via

/Users//Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/User

The application is then represented by a UID and within that is the Document folder. Placing the images in this folder and they adding their path to my applications database allows me display test data.

The problem is that each time I build and redeploy the application the old application folder is deleted and a new one is created, this means I have to copy the images to the new application folder and update the database.

Is there a way to automatically add test resources to an application when building and deploying? Should I be putting the test data in the bundle instead, and if so is there a way to not include the test data when building the actual release?

Many thanks in advance

Answer 1

Xocde should be smart enough to migrate anything from your 'old' UUID-based folder hierarchy to the 'new' one each time you build. Are you not seeing this move automatically?

Note: you should definitely be using dynamically generated paths here, not hard-coded. Use [NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES) objectAtIndex: 0]; or [@"~/Documents" stringByExpandingTildeInPath] to get the proper (current) path to your documents folder.