Objective Sharpie Verify Attributes

You will often find that bindings produced by Objective Sharpie will be annotated with the [Verify] attribute. These attributes indicate that you should verify that Objective Sharpie did the correct thing by comparing the binding with the original C/Objective-C declaration (which will be provided in a comment above the bound declaration).

Verification is recommended for all bound declarations, but is most likely required for declarations annotated with the [Verify] attribute. This is because in many situations, there is not enough metadata in the original native source code to infer how to best produce a binding. You may need to reference documentation or code comments inside the header files to make the best binding decision.

Once you have verified that the binding is correct or have fixed it to be correct, remove the [Verify] attribute from the binding.

Important

[Verify] attributes intentionally cause C# compilation errors so that you are forced to verify the binding. You should remove the [Verify] attribute when you have reviewed (and possibly corrected) the code.

Verify Hints Reference

The hint argument supplied to the attribute can be cross referenced with documentation below. Documentation for any produced [Verify] attributes will be provided on the console as well after the binding has completed.

[Verify] Hint	Description
InferredFromPreceedingTypedef	The name of this declaration was inferred by common convention from the immediately preceding typedef in the original native source code. Verify that the inferred name is correct as this convention is ambiguous.
ConstantsInterfaceAssociation	There's no fool-proof way to determine with which Objective-C interface an extern variable declaration may be associated. Instances of these are bound as [Field] properties in a partial interface into a near-by concrete interface to produce a more intuitive API, possibly eliminating the 'Constants' interface altogether.
MethodToProperty	An Objective-C method was bound as a C# property due to convention such as taking no parameters and returning a value (non-void return). Often methods like these should be bound as properties to surface a nicer API, but sometimes false-positives can occur and the binding should actually be a method.
StronglyTypedNSArray	A native NSArray* was bound as NSObject[]. It might be possible to more strongly type the array in the binding based on expectations set through API documentation (e.g. comments in the header file) or by examining the array contents through testing. For example, an NSArray* containing only NSNumber* instancescan be bound as NSNumber[] instead of NSObject[].

You can also quickly receive documentation for a hint using the sharpie verify-docs tool, for example:

sharpie verify-docs InferredFromPreceedingTypedef