njtynhj

Thanks for spending time reading my question.

I've been working as an iOS developer for more than 2 years and today I still feel shame because I don't know how to deal with frameworks. I've build some projects using my own frameworks, but I've never understood exactly what's the best practice doing this.

Lets see the following example:

Project -> FrameworkA -> AFNetworking - Charts - FMDB - more

So, I have a big FrameworkA with mostly all the app behavior and then a small project referencing this FrameworkA and customizing just icons, texts and images. I use to manage dependencies with CocoaPods and I would like to use it with FrameworkA. By this I could reference external libraries easily, but it seems it doesn't work for frameworks, only for projects. So, my questions is: how can I add AFNetworking, Charts, FMDB, etc to my FrameworkA and then reference the framework form my project?

I appreciate if you can give me some idea using CocoaPods or any other dependency manager. I don't like the old way by doing this manually.

I hope my case is clear.
Thanks!

It sounds like you are asking how to embed external frameworks such as AFNetworking into a framework you are developing, and then use that framework in your app.

This is what's known as embedded frameworks where one framework is stored within another. Generally speaking it's not a great idea and should be avoided because it can cause version clash issues.

The way I'd recommend doing this is to use CocoaPods or Carthage to link the external frameworks (AFNetworking, etc) into your framework project. But do to try to embedded them.

Then in your app project, again use CocoaPods or Carthage to link in your framework (you won't need to link the external ones unless you are directly using them in the app code). Then add the necessary build steps to copy both your framework file and all the external framework files to the finished app's framework directory.

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