Can you design a way to quickly backtrack what called a specific storyboard in Xcode?

Let’s say you’re in Xcode and you’re working on a project with like 50 different story boards with a large team. There is one particular view controller that you found in Xcode, but you can’t find while navigating through the physical app. You decide to go into Xcode to see what calls that view controller so that hopefully it can help direct you on how to navigate to it, but you have no luck.

The next step you try is setting up break points in the view controller .Swift file (maybe the viewDidLoad function) with hopes that while swiping through the app on a physical device (or simulator) you might hit a breakpoint, essentially telling you that you have landed on the view controller you are looking for. However, the app is so large that and you still can’t manage to find the screen.

Long story short, it would be very helpful if there was some type of functionality that every single storyboard file has a “backtrack” area where are you can quickly look at every file that actually calls it. This way you can backtrack so much easier. Every time you create a new file that segues into that story board, that story board should update it’s “backtrack” section. Maybe call it some thing like storyboard backtrack, or breadcrumbs. Or whatever… It will make debugging so much easier and a lot less time-consuming.

My primary focus is on low-level stuff, not the GUI, and I certainly don’t work on any projects that large, but…

My go-to tool for this sort of thing is the view debugger (Debug > View Debugging). This should both the view hierarchy and the view controller hierarchy, and you can use the latter to locate the view controller responsible for the view for the purpose of setting breakpoints and so on.

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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Tracing call is always a useful tool, but may be there is an easier answer here. Tell if I'm wrong.

For such a large project, I suppose you maintain a detailed architecture file, at least for interfaces, with everyone in charge of a part (let's say a single storyboard) documenting which "external" part (e.g., another storyboard) they call, from segue, instantiation…

Doing so, it should be easy to find who may be calling a given storyboard, under which circumstances…

Can you design a way to quickly backtrack what called a specific storyboard in Xcode?
 
 
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