iOS Hierarchy Viewer for UI and CoreData

iOS Hierarchy Viewer allows developers to debug their hierarchies for both UIView's and CoreData models.

If there are problems with layout calculations, you can find them with ease by introspecting real-time preview of your views inside a browser.
If your data is behaving weirdly, you can easily navigate through it via a browser.
This tool predates commercial tools like Reveal and Spark Inspector, and it's available for free.

since 1.4.6 version, we also give you debugging Core Data API in your project (if you use it). See 'Instruction' section to set it up.

Features

the client is implemented in HTML/JS/CSS. Additional software is not required
preview of device/simulator screen. Can be scaled and/or rotated on demand
debug frames shows the exact UIViews frames
property list shows obj-c properties and their values for selected UIView

Installation

download newest version of library from releases section Lib or use it as cocoapods spec
add these files to your project (drag&drop into xCode project)
make sure that you have added “-ObjC -all_load” to “other linker flags” (click at project root element, select “Build settings” tab, search for “other linker flags”)
~~if you already have JSONKit.m file in your project, please remove it because of linker conflict~~ We switched to Apple's NSJSONSerialization so skip this step.
add QuartzCore to frameworks list
launch hierarchy viewer in your code by calling [iOSHierarchyViewer start];. The best place for it is AppDelegate::applicationDidBecomeActive callback
find or get from logs device/simulator ip address and go to ‘http://[ip_address]:9449′ address (Chrome/Firefox only)

- (void)applicationDidBecomeActive:(UIApplication *)application
{
    // your stuff
    [iOSHierarchyViewer start];    
}

If you would like to see data from Core Data API:

add CoreData to frameworks list
go to 'http://[ip_address]:9449/core.html' and add NSManagedContext object to iOSHierarchyViewer library

- (void)applicationDidBecomeActive:(UIApplication *)application
{
    // your stuff
    
    setup persistent store coordinator for _managedObjectContext
    
    [iOSHierarchyViewer addContext:_managedObjectContext name:@"Root managed context"];    
}

You can always look at sample project, there is only 1 line of code needed for iOSHierarchyViewer to work with your project. We really like PrettyKit ( https://github.com/vicpenap/PrettyKit ), so we just enabled our hierarchy viewer in their sample project. If you don't know what PrettyKit is you need to check it out!

Changelog:

Version 1.3:

fixed crashes at UITextView:
some properties can be read only from UI thread
some properties ( like 'autocapitalizationType' ) are not KVC compliant.

Version 1.4:

Accesibility labels are used when set, making it easier to read hierarchy
All scaning now takes place on main thread.

Roadmap and Contributing:

Coloring non-opaque and misaligned view's similar to CoreAnimation instruments
Selected views from HTML side highlight in tree navigator
Support for cocos2d nodes visualisation and debugging

Did you find a bug ? Do you have feature request ? Do you want to merge a feature ? Send us a pull request or add an issue in the tracker!

License

MIT. Full license in LICENSE.txt file.

Authors:

Damian Kołakowski

Krzysztof Zabłocki