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Finding Information in a Project

Being able to find information—both knowing how to leverage the user interface to locate items in a project, as well as knowing how to find information about your project—is critical to working effectively in Xcode.

The Xcode user interface gives you many different ways to location project information and items. “The Project Window” describes the common paradigms of the Xcode user interface that let you find and manage project contents, including the Groups & Files list, which lets you organize and access the items in your project in an outline view, and the detail view, which lets you quickly filter your project contents. In addition, the Activity Viewer window lets you see additional information on Xcode operations, while the Info and inspector windows let you examine and modify items in your project.

Xcode also maintains a great deal of information about your project’s contents, which it uses to assist you in the development process. The Xcode feature called Code Sense maintains an index that contains symbolic information for your project; Xcode uses this information as the basis for a number of features that let you browse the symbols in your project, view the class hierarchy of projects that use an object-oriented programming language, and search your project for symbol definitions.

As you are working on your software product, you often need to find information on system technologies. Xcode also includes a full-featured documentation viewer and installs a comprehensive suite of technical documentation. Using Xcode’s documentation lookup features, you can quickly and easily search all or part of Apple’s technical documentation for questions, keywords, or symbols.

This chapter describes how to use Xcode to find information about your project’s contents and about Apple technologies. It covers:

• Searching your project for text, symbols, or using regular expressions.

• Using the Project Symbols smart group to find information on the symbols in your project.

• Viewing classes and class members for projects that include object-oriented code, using the class browser.

• Using the documentation window to browse Apple’s technical documentation and search the Reference Library for keywords or symbols.

Contents:

Searching in a Project
Viewing Project Symbols and Classes
Viewing Documentation

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