About

The Airbrake iOS Notifier is designed to give developers instant notification of problems that occur in their apps. With just a few lines of code and a few extra files in your project, your app will automatically phone home whenever a crash or exception is encountered. These reports go straight to Airbrake where you can see information like backtrace, device type, app version, and more.

To see how this might help you, check out this screencast. If you have questions or need support, please visit Airbrake support

The notifier requires iOS 4.0 or higher for iOS projects and Mac OS 10.7 or higher for Mac OS projects.

Signals

The notifier handles all unhandled exceptions, and a select list of Unix signals:

SIGABRT
SIGBUS
SIGFPE
SIGILL
SIGSEGV
SIGTRAP

Symbolication

In order for the call stack to be properly symbolicated at the time of a crash, applications built with the notifier should not be stripped of their symbol information at compile time. If these settings are not set as recommended, frames from your binary will be displayed as hex return addresses instead of readable strings. These hex return addresses can be symbolicated using atos. More information about symbolication and these build settings can be found in Apple's developer documentation. Here are the settings that control code stripping:

Deployment Postprocessing: Off
Strip Debug Symbols During Copy: Off
Strip Linked Product: Off

Versioning

Airbrake supports a version floor for reported notices. A setting called "Latest app version" is available in your project settings that lets you specify the lowest app version for which crashes will be saved. This version is compared using semantic versioning. The notifier uses your CFBundleVersion to make this comparison. If you have apps in the wild that are using an older notifier version and don't report this bundle version, the notices will dropped by Airbrake. For more information on how this is implemented, read this knowledge base article.

Installation

Drag the Airbrake folder to your project and make sure "Copy Items" and "Create Groups" are selected
Add SystemConfiguration.framework and libxml2.dylib to your project
Add the path /usr/include/libxml2 to Header Search Paths in your project's build settings under "All Configurations"
Check the supported localizations of your app under your project settings. Xcode will automatically add all languages that the Airbrake notifier supports to the list of supported languages of your app, so you might want to delete some of them.

Upgrading

Please remove all of the resources used by the notifier from your project before upgrading. This is the best way to make sure all of the appropriate files are present and no extra files exist.

Running The Notifier

The ABNotifier class is the primary class you will interact with while using the notifier. All of its methods and properties, along with the ABNotifierDelegate protocol are documented in their headers. Please read through the header files for a complete reference of the library.

To run the notifier you only need to complete two steps. First, import the ABNotifier header file in your app delegate

#import "ABNotifier.h"

Next, call the start notifier method at the very beginning of your application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:

[ABNotifier startNotifierWithAPIKey:@"key"
                    environmentName:ABNotifierAutomaticEnvironment
                             useSSL:YES // only if your account supports it
                           delegate:self];

The API key argument expects your Airbrake project API key. The environment name you provide will be used to categorize received crash reports in the Airbrake web interface. The notifier provides several factory environment names that you are free to use.

ABNotifierAutomaticEnvironment
ABNotifierDevelopmentEnvironment
ABNotifierAdHocEnvironment
ABNotifierAppStoreEnvironment
ABNotifierReleaseEnvironment

The ABNotifierAutomaticEnvironment environment will set the environment to release or development depending on the presence of the DEBUG macro.

Environment Variables

Airbrake notices support custom environment variables. To add your own values to this part of the notice, use the "environmentValue" family of methods found in ABNotifier.h.

Exception Logging

As of version 3.0 of the notifier, you can log your own exceptions at any time.

@try {
    // something dangerous
}
@catch (NSException *e) {
    [ABNotifier logException:e];
}

Debugging

To test that the notifier is working inside your application, a simple test method is provided. This method raises an exception, catches it, and reports it as if a real crash happened. Add this code to your application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: to test the notifier:

[ABNotifier writeTestNotice];

If you use the DEBUG macro to signify development builds the notifier will log notices and errors to the console as they are reported to help see more details.

#Implementing the Delegate Protocol

The ABNotifierDelegate protocol allows you to respond to actions going on inside the notifier as well as provide runtime customizations. As of version 3.0 of the notifier, a matching set of notifications are posted to NSNotificationCenter. All of the delegate methods in the ABNotifierDelegate protocol are documented in ABNotifierDelegate.h. Here are just a few of those methods:

MyAppDelegate.h

#import ABNotifier.h

@interface MyAppDelegate : NSObject <UIApplicationDelegate, ABNotifierDelegate>

// your properties and methods

@end

MyAppDelegate.m

@implementation MyAppDelegate
  
// your other methods

#pragma mark - notifier delegate
/*
  These are only a few of the delegate methods you can implement.
  The rest are documented in ABNotifierDelegate.h. All of the
  delegate methods are optional.
*/
- (void)notifierWillDisplayAlert {
  [gameController pause];
}
- (void)notifierDidDismissAlert {
  [gameController resume];
}
- (NSString *)titleForNoticeAlert {
  return @"Oh Noes!";
}
- (NSString *)bodyForNoticeAlert {
  return @"MyApp has detected unreported crashes, would you like to send a report to the developer?";
}
  
@end

#Contributors

markshiz/hoptoad-ios