Displaying HTML content stored in a folder within an iOS app

Through this journey of getting to know "how to build apps for the iPhone with Swift", I have encountered a fair share of problems. You can have a read of my previous posts on

  1. Getting started with iOS programming
  2. Serving HTML content in an iOS app
  3. Discovering Core Data migrations
  4. And how to deal with Core Data migrations 

to get an idea of the sort of problems I have faced. In this post, I am going to share about a rather simple issue that I encountered very early when I started building my app. The app I am building is an HTML5 app, actually no; A more accurate statement for this would be that it is a hybrid app, as the logic is almost equally distributed between native code and HTML5 code.

Problem

The problem I had was that when I would add a folder to my iOS app with web content and tried to refer to it using

let path = NSBundle.mainBundle().pathForResource("index", ofType: "html", inDirectory:"webContent")
It simply wouldn't work i.e. the file could not be found.

Why was this a problem?

So I built the first version of my app using JQuery mobile and I thought it was all done except a few features that I would still have to add to it, once I solve all iOS specific problems. It was during this time, I met Ionic framework for building HTML5 apps. If nothing else, I so fell in love with its UI elements. Apps built with Ionic look very...native"ish" and add to that, it had a host of awesome features that I could benefit from.

How was I adding the files to my Xcode project?

Well I would drag the directory into the Xcode project and then choose the option to create group, as seen in this screenshot.

Solution

Initially I choose to search for something like, "How to refer to html files in a directory inside your Xcode project", I failed to find a solution in a few hours. A question on StackOverflow (SO), received negative votes, seriously SO can be a little demotivating sometimes to developers trying to learn new things. Anyway since I had several other issues to solve, I decided to ignore this one and solve the other problems first, hoping that as I continue developing, my knowledge of both Xcode and iOS development will get better and I will be able to find a solution to this. I could not be more correct, the solution to my problem was really really simple. I just had to know what an Application Bundle is. Once I knew what I was dealing with, my search term changed and the solution was immediately obvious. The answer is really simple, I should not have created "Groups", instead, I should have picked the other option and that was to "create folder references" instead. Like in the screenshot below

References

This SO post was very helpful

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