String value in Settings.bundle empty after update

Question

For QA purposes I display our app's build version in the application' settings view as a PSTitleValueSpecifier. I set our app's current build number as the DefaultValue and I update it for every new build.

My problem is, whenever I deploy a new build of our application on a dev phone via Xcode, the version value doesn't update but remains with the previous build. The only way to update the version's value is to delete the app from the dev phone and then deploy the new build. Obviously, this approach does not please our QA department since they then loose all of their persisted data.

I have tried, cleaning the project, re-compiling and deploying but I get the same behavior.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Any idea on how to work around it/fix it?

Answer 1

It is because this value is stored using NSUserDefaults which is stored on the disk and only removed when the app is removed. You can explicitly set it in code the same way you would any other user default. You could just create a field in your Info.plist that you change when you want to send a new build. Read that value from the plist on startup and then write it to your user defaults with:

NSString *value = [[NSBundle mainBundle] objectForInfoDictionaryKey:@"build_version"];
[[NSUserDefaults standardDefaults] setObject:value forKey@"build_version"];
[[NSUserDefaults standardDefaults] synchronize];

Of course, you replace "build_version" with whatever your key name is in your settings file. It's a hack, but it might satisfy your QA people.

For argument sake, it is actually reasonable to expect that you have to completely remove the previous version before seeing the version number update, however I realize not all QA people are reasonable. ;-)