.. _link_apple_framework:

How to link with Apple Frameworks
=================================

It is common in OSx that your conan package needs to link with a complete Apple framework, 
and, of course, you want to propagate this information to all projects/libraries that uses your package.

With regular libraries we use ``self.cpp_info.libs`` object to append to it all the libraries:

.. code-block:: python

    def package_info(self):  
                
        self.cpp_info.libs = ["SDL2"]
        self.cpp_info.libs.append("OpenGL32")

With frameworks we need to declare the "-framework flag" as a linker flag:

.. code-block:: python

    def package_info(self):  
                
        self.cpp_info.libs = ["SDL2"] 
          
        self.cpp_info.exelinkflags.append("-framework Carbon")
        self.cpp_info.exelinkflags.append("-framework CoreAudio")
        self.cpp_info.exelinkflags.append("-framework Security")
        self.cpp_info.exelinkflags.append("-framework IOKit")
        
        self.cpp_info.sharedlinkflags = self.cpp_info.exelinkflags

In the previous example we are using ``self.cpp_info.exelinkflags``. If we are using CMake to consume this package, it will only link those
frameworks if we are building an executable and ``sharedlinkflags`` will only apply if we are building a shared library.

If we are not using CMake to consume this package ``sharedlinkflags`` and ``exelinkflags`` are used indistinctly.
In the example above we are assigning in the last line ``sharedlinkflags`` with ``exelinkflags``, so no matter what the consumer will build,
it will indicate to the linker to link with the specified frameworks.