Using PDFNet for iOS as an Adobe Air ANE (Adobe Native Extension)

[James]

Q:

We are experiencing some problems while building an ANE (Adobe Native Extension) for iOS that includes your library.

The problem happens in the last step of the process, when you have to package the AIR application that contains the ANE extension into an IPA (using the adt.jar by command line from the flex sdk). The error is:

[java] com.adobe.air.ipa.ProcessError: Unable to generate executable

     [java]  at com.adobe.air.ipa.AOTCompiler.launchProcess(AOTCompiler.java:311)

     [java]  at com.adobe.air.ipa.AOTCompiler.linkMachO(AOTCompiler.java:1764)

     [java]  at com.adobe.air.ipa.AOTCompiler.generateMachineBinaries(AOTCompiler.java:1914)

     [java]  at com.adobe.air.ipa.IPAOutputStream.createIosBinary(IPAOutputStream.java:431)

     [java]  at com.adobe.air.ipa.IPAOutputStream.finalizeSig(IPAOutputStream.java:825)

     [java]  at com.adobe.air.ApplicationPackager.createPackage(ApplicationPackager.java:91)

     [java]  at com.adobe.air.ipa.IPAPackager.createPackage(IPAPackager.java:257)

     [java]  at com.adobe.air.ADT.parseArgsAndGo(ADT.java:588)

     [java]  at com.adobe.air.ADT.run(ADT.java:435)

     [java]  at com.adobe.air.ADT.main(ADT.java:485)

     [java] Compilation failed while executing : ld64

     [java] ld: in /var/folders/nd/y9cpb77576q5fzp37g4cy97h0000gn/T/826c328c-aaef-4d08-af0e-7c848b553782/libcom.companyname.product.ane.demo.TestPDFTron.a(SWIGTYPE_p_void.o), archive member 'SWIGTYPE_p_void.o' with length 3440 is not mach-o or llvm bitcode for architecture armv7

It also gives the same error with other classes (with other examples we're trying to build):

[java] ld: in /var/folders/nd/y9cpb77576q5fzp37g4cy97h0000gn/T/71f69f16-b24a-44ad-b5de-4f927f05ea9f/libcom.companyname.product.ane.demo.productANE.a(FreeText.o), archive member 'FreeText.o' with length 11936 is not mach-o or llvm bitcode for architecture armv7

The ANE itself it's just a wrapper of your library so we could use your native components from an AIR application. The ANE compiles just fine (it is including your .h files and the libPDFNet.a library) but the problems happens in the last step when we try to package the whole thing into an .ipa application for testing.

Do you have any experience integrating your library into a Adobe Native Extension? If we don't include your files into the ANE, the process completes with no problems and we could generate a demo application.

Could you give us some hint of what could be happening?

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A: (from customer)

Yesterday we finally got our product working in an ANE extension, including your PDFViewCtrl component. The problem seems to be a bug in Adobe's AIR SDK, specifically the Adobe modified version of the linker ld. Using the MacPorts version (port -v -k install ld64 +llvm-3.2), everything compiles fine. We can certify that your library can work perfectly fine in a native extension :) More info on Adobe's support forum here: http://forums.adobe.com/message/5469935#5469935