Open Radar

 
Summary:
There is no public documentation to allow the user to create or maintain templates for projects or files in Xcode. For some users, the Apple-provided templates are either insufficient or contain unnecessary boilerplate that just gets deleted immediately. It would be great to be able to create the templates for files or projects like this, and my team and I have managed to hack something together that “works”. However, we have absolutely no documentation to help us maintain this, so any time we want to make a change it’s a complete nightmare. Adding public documentation would give developers more flexibility to create and maintain these templates in a usable, shareable way. 


Steps to Reproduce:
1. Try to create or update a custom Xcode template. 
2. Find that only documentation is a blog post describing stuff from Xcode 4 and the odd StackOverflow Post. 
3. Tear out hair working through multiple trial/failure cases trying to get templates to work. 

Expected Results:
The entire process for creating and maintaining Xcode templates is documented by Apple, including: 
- Information on how to install custom templates
- Expected/Required keys and valid values
- How to create a template which extends a parent template
- How to include different qualifiers and options
- The macros which Xcode expands at project creation time. 
- How to override a parent template’s expected files
- How to override a parent template’s expected Container (ex: I would like to replace the Apple template for tests with my own, but I can only get it to add an additional Container). 
- Information on anything which has changed between template or Xcode versions. 
- Anything and everything else Apple deems necessary or relevant. 

Actual Results:
Hair torn out, attached screenshot of multiple attempts at getting the template to work being the only way to tell if I’m doing it right or wrong. 

Regression:
Not a regression - this has been the case forever. 

Notes:
Please? :)