The Arcane World Of Xcode 6.0 Downloadable DocSets: Part Two — Documentation Sets

Structure

An Xcode documentation set is a specialized kind of bundle.

At the top-level the Contents directory contains two files

    Info.plist

and

    version.plist

and a single directory

    Resources

The Info.plist contains a set of Bundle specific properties, identifier, name and version, and a set of DocSet specific properties.

The version.plist contains version information.

The Resources directory contains the documentation set metadata e.g., indexes, the table of contents, etc, plus two directories

    Documents

and

    Tokens

Locations

Internal

Documentation sets can be found within an Xcode bundle in the directory

    $(XCODE_BUNDLE)/Contents/Developer/Documentation/DocSets

By default these documentation sets contain the metadata and the tokens but no actual documentation, i.e., the Documents directory is empty.

Instead the documentation is accessed over the net as required.

External

Versions of the documentation sets contained within the Xcode bundle which contain all of the actual documentation as well as the metadata and tokens can be downloaded.

These versions are installed in the directory

   ~/Library/Developer/Shared/Documentation/DocSets

The presence of a documentation set external to the Xcode bundle containing the full documentation will cause Xcode to use the documentation from that documentation set when necessary rather than accessing it over the net.

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