BUG - addTargetDependency - If project doesn't contain PBXTargetDependency or PBXContainerItemProxy

Start in lib/pbxProject.js at addTargetDependency and inspect the existing test suite for coverage of addTarget or addTargetDependency. Reproduce the single-target .xcodeproj case without PBXTargetDependency or PBXContainerItemProxy, then add a regression test. Done means dependencies are created or processed correctly and existing tests still pass.

Description

One Line Summary

addTargetDependency misses some dependency links if PBXTargetDependency or PBXContainerItemProxy are not present.

Affected Projects

Calls made to addTarget or addTargetDependency with any .xcodeproj that only has one target, these do NOT have PBXTargetDependency or PBXContainerItemProxy.

Details

The root cause

The following if statement in the addTargetDependency function skips the dependencies and other steps if it is missing.
https://github.com/apache/cordova-node-xcode/blob/8b98cabc5978359db88dc9ff2d4c015cba40f150/lib/pbxProject.js#L860

Possible fixes

Option 1 - Smallest number changes

A simple way to fix this would be to use short-circuit evaluation where these vars are assigned to handle null, undefined, or if no key exists when reading from hash.project.objects.
https://github.com/apache/cordova-node-xcode/blob/8b98cabc5978359db88dc9ff2d4c015cba40f150/lib/pbxProject.js#L834-L835
This could become the following to fix this issue:

pbxTargetDependencySection = this.hash.project.objects[pbxTargetDependency] || {},
pbxContainerItemProxySection = this.hash.project.objects[pbxContainerItemProxy] || {};

I have tested this on some projects on my machine and was able to successfully run an App Extension on an iOS device to confirm the solution works.

Option 2 - Larger Refactor - Fix some clean up

Same fix as option 1, but clean up the hard coded strings.

1. Put these at the top of the file:

const PBX_TARGET_DEPENDECY = "PBXTargetDependency";
const PBX_CONTAINER_ITEM_PROXY = "PBXContainerItemProxy";

2. Use them here and remove the old vars:

const pbxTargetDependencySection = this.hash.project.objects[PBXTargetDependency] || {};
const pbxContainerItemProxySection = this.hash.project.objects[PBXContainerItemProxy] || {};

Workaround

// Add code anytime before calling addTarget or addTargetDependency
const projObjects = xcodeProject.hash.project.objects;
projObjects['PBXTargetDependency'] = projObjects['PBXTargetDependency'] || {};
projObjects['PBXContainerItemProxy'] = projObjects['PBXTargetDependency'] || {};

Related issues

PR #12 also made a note of this issue:

2. addTargetDependency() is indirectly called as well from proj.addTarget('AppExtension', 'app_extension'). In my project, PBXTargetDependency and PBXContainerItemProxy sections did not yet exist which results in the necessary dependencies not being set up properly for building the extension with the main app. Create these sections if they do not exist.

They attempted to fix this in a similar way I am suggesting with commit 2e09d78efdb1d667dd513a3c97c46dc448305f5f.
This PR was not merged however, so this is still an active issue.

There is another issue #37, that references PR #12, notes that targetDependency is still an issue.

Submitting a PR - Is this an active library?

It has been over a year since there has been a release or even a commit. If the maintainers could chime in I'd be happy to create one.

I have read the CONTRIBUTING.md guide, is there any more to it than that? I see there is a good number of tests, I'll make sure to add one to cover the code change. Lastly let me know which of the possible fixes you prefer or if you have another idea.