Google Place Picker in React Native

I was facing some issues in my React Native project and was trying a few solutions. One of things that I tried was upgrading to the latest package. Even though it was a simple upgrade from 0.39 to 0.40 it turned out to be problematic. The header file organization of RN changed which require manual updates to some of the Objective-C source. After failing to fix the problem with manual update (not sure why), I decided it was easier to re-create the project from scratch using RN 0.40. After all, I should not need to do more than copy my source JavaScript files over to the new project, right? It turns out that I had forgotten about a few manual steps I had to perform in the process of setting up the project.

First, a few of the npm modules required linking. I was glad I had already documented this in a previous post.

Next, was dealing with requirements of the Google Places Picker module. Luckily, they have documentation. However, I recalled from my initial experience with the module there were some steps that were missing from the docs. Going back to my original notes, the missing steps had to do with enabling the API in the Google console, which you have to do only once (note that you have to enable more than one API).

So back to applying the steps in the docs, I needed to set up CocoaPods. The first time I set it up I got some warning about unused pods and compilation failed. It turns out that the sample pod config file provided in the docs is of an obsolete format. The file needed to look like this:

target 'places' do

  target 'placesTests' do
     inherit! :search_paths
  end

end

# react-native-google-place-picker dependencies

pod 'GooglePlacePicker', '= 2.0.1'
pod 'GooglePlaces', '= 2.0.1'
pod 'GoogleMaps', '= 2.0.1'

Once fixed, the ‘unused’ error was gone, but then I ran into linking errors of the type:

Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64

This required some searching. A line needed to be added to the Podfile that instructs CocoaPods to use an Objective-C framework, instead of plain libraries. Adding the line:

use_frameworks!

inside the ‘target’ in the Podfile fixed the problem.

Finally, I was now ready to copy my JavaScript files and get back the project to a valid state. So much for an upgrade from 0.39 to 0.40!