CODEWITHSUNDEEP
objective-cxcodecocoacocoa-touchdeprecated
Julien
Julien

Reputation: 9442

How to deprecate a method in Objective-C

We have our library we ship to our customers, and I'd like to mark some methods as "deprecated" because we changed them (like Apple does in the iPhone SDK).

I've seen the __OSX_AVAILABLE_BUT_DEPRECATED pre-processor macro, which is mapped to __AVAILABILITY_INTERNAL, which is mapped to __attribute__((deprecated))...

Well i'm a bit confused with this stuff!

Anybody knows something about that ?

Upvotes: 88

Views: 35926

Answers (5)

Lal Krishna
Lal Krishna

Reputation: 16190

Swift 5.0

Deprecate any method/class/struct/protocols using @available

@available(*, deprecated, message: "Parse your data by hand instead")
func parseData() { }

@available(*, deprecated, renamed: "loadData")
func fetchData() { }

@available(swift, obsoleted: 4.1, renamed: "attemptConnection")
func testConnection() { }

@available(swift, deprecated: 4.0, obsoleted: 5.0, message: "This will be removed in v5.0; please migrate to a different API.")

Possible params:

  • introduced
  • deprecated
  • obsoleted
  • message
  • renamed

For more info see apple doc: Attributes

Upvotes: 18

Mojtaba Hosseini
Mojtaba Hosseini

Reputation: 120092

- FOR SWIFT CODE:

Put this right above the method: @available(*, deprecated: <#Version#>, message: <#Message#>)

example:

@available(*, deprecated: 11, message: "Use color assets instead")
public struct ColorPaletteItemResource: ColorPaletteItemResourceType {
    ...
}

Upvotes: 0

Ant6n
Ant6n

Reputation: 2007

If you are using C++14 in your xcode project, you may also use the [[deprecated]] or [[deprecated("reason")]] attribute that is now part of the language.

see documentation: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/attributes

Upvotes: 1

kennytm
kennytm

Reputation: 523734

__attribute__((deprecated)) is the gcc way (also supported in clang) of marking a function / method as deprecated. When one is marked as "deprecated", a warning will be produced whenever anyone calls it.

The syntax for normal functions would be

__attribute__((deprecated))
void f(...) {
  ...
}

// gcc 4.5+ / clang
__attribute__((deprecated("g has been deprecated please use g2 instead")))
void g(...) {
  ...
}

and that of Objective-C methods would be

@interface MyClass : NSObject { ... }
-(void)f:(id)x __attribute__((deprecated));
...
@end

You can also mark the whole class as deprecated with

__attribute__((deprecated))
@interface DeprecatedClass : NSObject { ... }
...
@end

Apple also provides the <AvailabilityMacros.h> header which provides the DEPRECATED_ATTRIBUTE and DEPRECATED_MSG_ATTRIBUTE(msg) macros that expand to the above attributes, or nothing if the compiler doesn't support attributes. Note that this header doesn't exist outside of OS X / iOS.

Side note, if you are using Swift you use the @available attribute to deprecate an item, e.g.

@available(*, deprecated=2.0, message="no longer needed")
func f() {
    ...
}

Upvotes: 154

skywinder
skywinder

Reputation: 21436

You can also use more readable define DEPRECATED_ATTRIBUTE

It defined in usr/include/AvailabilityMacros.h:

#define DEPRECATED_ATTRIBUTE        __attribute__((deprecated))
#define DEPRECATED_MSG_ATTRIBUTE(msg) __attribute((deprecated((msg))))

Objective-C methods example:

@interface MyClass : NSObject { ... }
-(void)foo:(id)x DEPRECATED_ATTRIBUTE;

// If you want to specify deprecated message:
-(void)bar:(id)x DEPRECATED_MSG_ATTRIBUTE("Use baz: method instead.");
...
@end

You can also mark the whole class as deprecated:

DEPRECATED_ATTRIBUTE
@interface DeprecatedClass : NSObject { ... }
...
@end

Upvotes: 78

Related Questions