I am trying to create a refactoring tool that would allow me to get a syntax tree from an objective-c class so that I can change the structure of the class and output a different version of it that matches my criteria. I am looking at Clang's Libtooling to generate an AST and then take it from there, the issue I'm having is that I need to somehow make sure I provice all paths to all possible headers that are being imported from this source, and that's something I'd like to avoid.
I am wondering if there is a way to generate the AST for a class without having to for example provide paths for the framework containing the class definitions of the properties that the class I wanna refactor hold.
Ideally I would be able to get nodes in raw text of my source file containing things like properties, functions, etc... this way I'd be able to traverse that tree and change its structure to later on regenerate my source in the desired way.
After doing more research I deveoped the understanding that what I was trying to do is not even possible as LibTooling based tools need syntactic and semantic information about a program. This information can be provided via a compile_commands.json file like stated on the documentation:
Clang Tooling needs a compilation database to figure out specific build options for each file. Currently it can create a compilation database from the compile_commands.json file
For Xcode projects, this file can be generated like this:
xcodebuild -project PROJECT_NAME.xcodeproj | xcpretty -r json-compilation-database --output compile_commands.json
you will need to install the xcpretty gem. (gem install xcpretty)
Source: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/HowToSetupToolingForLLVM.html