Invalid CFBundleIdentifier '_SwiftUINavigationState'

[jaroslavas]

After integrating CTA and swiftui-navigation into our app, I tried uploading it to testflight, but got the error:

Anyone got the same error?

[mbrandonw]

Are you using Tuist by any chance to build your application? There is a known issue (that I thought was fixed) when dealing with frameworks with underscores.

If you are not using Tuist, then how are you integrating SwiftUINavigation into your project. FWIW I don't think this is a problem with the library because it is a pure SPM package, and so has no concept of a bundle identifier. There must be something else in your build settings that create the bundle identifier.

[jaroslavas]

Nope, no tuist :(

Project is quite complicated: we have cocoapods for old dependencies, then there is a library (let's call it core) in xcode that depends on local SPM packages, which in turn depend in TCA, swiftui-navigation and other. What is more, xcode doesn't want to build that way :) So we had to also add all dependencies of local packages as dependencies of our core library and some packages as apps packages too. I know it sounds like a mess, but it works 🤷

[mbrandonw]

Unfortunately I'm not sure there is much we can do to help without more information :/ It does sound like a problem with how the build system is set up.

[jaroslavas]

OK, thanks for the info still 👍

[protonjohn]

A similar issue appears here: facebook/facebook-ios-sdk#1897

Somebody observed that the issue reproduces when "a workspace that has a framework target and an application target."

I suspect that Xcode will magically build SPM dependencies as frameworks when you have a situation where a workspace contains:

• An app depending on SPM package X and framework F
• Framework F depending on SPM package X

If Xcode embedded everything, it would have two copies of the same code. So instead it builds everything as frameworks so all of the code can play nice, using package names as the bundle identifiers. But it gets unhappy about the underscore during the build process:

warning: invalid character in Bundle Identifier. This string must be a uniform type identifier (UTI) that contains only alphanumeric (A-Z,a-z,0-9), hyphen (-), and period (.) characters. (in target '_SwiftUINavigationState' from project 'swiftui-navigation')

And TestFlight ultimately rejects the app for the same reason.

Unfortunately I do think this is something that should be fixed from swiftui-navigation's side. It's not unusual for Xcode to build apps and frameworks out of the same workspace, as both this and the Facebook issue demonstrate. I'm not sure how many people are already linking _SwiftUINavigationState that this would be a breaking change for, though, since it appears to be a public export of the library :/

[mbrandonw]

Ok, if there is something we can do to help the situation we are certainly willing. However, can someone provide a project that demonstrates the problem for us? We would like to know that we are actually fixing the problem.

[protonjohn]

Hi Brandon,

I'm not sure how that version got pinned to 1.0, it might be an Xcode bug. It looks normal on my end:

Note that the build issue shows up as a warning, it does not cause an error which fails the build. You can see it when you build the project in Xcode:

This issue is a little evil because during normal development, including up to archival, everything works fine; it's when you try to upload it to TestFlight that it gets rejected. IMO on Apple's side this warning should be an error if they don't intend to let you ship an app that has this problem, but that's for them to debate about :)

Until they relax this requirement or otherwise resolve this issue, we are unable to use TCA due to the underscore in the package name _SwiftUINavigationState. We'd really appreciate your help removing it, since we've already invested a good amount of effort moving to this framework, and didn't notice that our refactor was dead in the water until we tried uploading the first test version.

[mbrandonw]

Yeah I was able to reproduce when trying to submit to the App Store. I still don't fully understand why this is happening though. For one, it doesn't happen in our isowords application, which has a dependency on TCA. And further, it doesn't seem to happen when depending on Apple's swift-collections library, which also has an underscored module.

It does make me think there is something about the project set up that is causing problems, but I'm not sure how to diagnose it. So, we just opened #112 to rename the module to something without an underscore, and it does mean there is a chance for people's builds to be broken if they update their dependence on SwiftUINavigation without updating their dependence on TCA.

[mbrandonw]

The latest release of this library and TCA should have fixed the problem. Please let us know if there are other problems.

[protonjohn]

It might have something to do with the fact that the underscored module itself isn't exported. Here's what I see when I try to include it:

And here's swiftui-navigation 0.7.2:

I can't know for sure why it works this way, but if your Isowords app had a structure similar to my description above, you should be able to reproduce the problem.

I do think Apple should support underscores in its package names though, this is definitely a bug on their part. And if they don't think it is, they should loudly state that people shouldn't be doing this.

[stephencelis]

@protonjohn The underscored module is new and exported from the main branch of swift-collections, it is also available from the window you're looking at. Despite this, it still seems to build OK. We also thought maybe the @_exported import _SwiftUINavigationState in TCA could be causing the problem, but that didn't seem to be the differentiator, either. So we were unable to track down the exact difference 🤷

[jtaby]

FWIW we're facing the same issue and the project structure described by @protonjohn mirrors our own workspace setup

[stephencelis]

@jtaby We've cut a new release that has changed the name of the underscored module. Point to 0.8.0 and you should be good to go.