feat(ios): use @objc for bridge and auxiliary APIs

[NathanWalker]

This allows Capacitor plugins to be registered with the bridge, for example:
NativeScript/plugins@644b896#diff-8ccbf3f8847b6a1b15944609e0e0610409a8b5e910076d7298aeab62cd998e84R46

[Steven0351]

LGTM, thanks for the contribution!

[Steven0351]

@NathanWalker I looked a little closer at your code example there, the plugin(withName:) method on the bridge does not register the plugin. Currently all plugins on iOS are registered on initialization without the developer needing to do anything.

[NathanWalker]

Oh nice lemme try the latest version and will see if we can get that to work - previously at least on 0.4.1 the only way we could make the plugins active was to use plugin(withName:)

[Steven0351]

The actual registration actually happens down in Capacitor, so that's interesting that the plugin wouldn't load for you before. I know Android requires explicitly registering them, but in our e-commerce demo one of our Portals (the profile page specifically) uses the CapacitorCamera plugin, which is never explicitly registered anywhere in the iOS application.

Also, on a side note, we had an issue with how we were cutting releases for a specific branch of Capacitor we use and you may have some breakage. Unfortunately, you'll have to update to 0.5.1 as it's the only version of Portals that will work. Specifically the frame parameter in the PortalWebView initializer is no longer needed.

[NathanWalker]

Ok excellent thanks for this info - will take me few days to confirm things but will post back here once I know more (likely early next week).

[NathanWalker]

@Steven0351 I've been having trouble with 0.5.1 due to IonicLiveUpdates? Even when manually specifying a deploy target of 14 or even 15 it continues to complain?
Do you know if there's a current issue related to this (I could not find anywhere but seems odd as I've tried a number of things but continues to complain about IonicLiveUpdates or ZIPFoundation.

[Steven0351]

I’ll take a look at this tomorrow, as far as I’m aware IonicLiveUpdates was built with swift module evolution support. We had some issues like that with Carthage though. Is this reproducible with the NativeScript plug-in?

[NathanWalker]

We haven't published the update yet but working on getting 0.5.1 operational in this branch:
https://github.com/NativeScript/plugins/tree/feat/updates

Explored several things like setting BUILD_LIBRARY_FOR_DISTRIBUTION = 'YES' as discussed in some other posts as well as overriding some build settings in the Podfile to no avail thus far (still exploring).

If you ended up trying it, could try these exact steps (would require npm i -g nativescript for the cli):

$ git clone https://github.com/NativeScript/plugins.git
$ cd plugins
$ npm run setup
$ npm start
   // type 'focus.ionic', ENTER
   // this will focus the workspace to only the ionic portals plugin enabled (to avoid noise from other plugins)

$ npm start
   // type 'demo.ios', ENTER
   // this would start the ios demo which will initiate a build which should result in same error

If helpful, you can open the demo app in Xcode via:

open apps/demo/platforms/ios/demo.xcworkspace

Some relevant files to see some settings in place:

• demo project Podfile which helps override any included pods: https://github.com/NativeScript/plugins/blob/feat/updates/tools/assets/App_Resources/iOS/Podfile
• demo project build.xcconfig used to also override any typical build settings (where we set the min deploy target if needed): https://github.com/NativeScript/plugins/blob/feat/updates/tools/assets/App_Resources/iOS/build.xcconfig#L7
• the Podfile of the ionic portals plugin (which is merged into any projects Podfile): https://github.com/NativeScript/plugins/blob/feat/updates/packages/ionic-portals/platforms/ios/Podfile

[Steven0351]

I was able to reproduce with the NativeScript demo. I was also able to get it to compile by making IonicLiveUpdates a local podspec reference and building from source, so there's definitely something going on with the compiled binary SDK. What makes me curious (and concerned) is not having seen this same issue pop up with our demo application. We also didn't have any issues with that when doing some stuff with React Native.

[Steven0351]

If you get a chance, would you try compiling the iOS project of our e-commerce demo and let me know if it builds fine for you? The thing that's boggling my mind the most is that contrary to the build error, ZipFoundation's minimum iOS target is actually 12.0. In fact, the only library in the entire dependency tree that has a 14.0 minimum target is IonicPortals itself.

[NathanWalker]

ECommerce demo built fine - curious indeed; I'll continue to try few things and I'm sure can figure out what's going on there.

[NathanWalker]

@Steven0351 just quick update - I got above to build; was a combination of ensuring the 'IonicPortals' pod had declared at least platform :ios, '14.0' and the more important detail is that the build settings (or rather build.xcconfig) specified IPHONEOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET = 12.0 specifically.

[NathanWalker]

Still working through the API changes and will update more here as I know this week if the changes in this PR are indeed still needed.

[Steven0351]

I think the changes are fine to stay regardless, exposing those pieces to objective-c isn't really much of a maintenance burden.