phrase pull format options to set extractionState for .xcstrings

[binovsky]

Hello,

recently we decided to migrate our iOS Xcode project from .strings and .stringsdict files to newer .xcstrings format mainly to take advantage of newly introduced compile time generated swift symbols for localisation keys. We updated our .phraseapp.yml to export into .xcstrings and all is working good. But to take advantage of Swift compiler to generate a Swift symbols for us, we have to set each key extractionState to manual as when this key is omited from json file it's implicitly set as automatic and in that case Swift won't generate symbols for us. We made small script to load the JSON and insert extractionState key for each localisation key but it would be great if we got some format option configuration value that we could set in .phraseapp.yml and phrase cli would do this automatically.

[bikmazefe]

Hey @binovsky, we parse the extractionState from the uploaded .xcstrings files and store them internally to use during export. If you could re-upload/push your keys with extractionState set to manual in an .xcstrings file you can have that state in subsequent exports/pulls. Would this solve your issue?

[binovsky]

Our workflow is that we have shared project between multiple clients iOS, Android, etc. and we're just pulling in changes via cli and all new keys are being added via phrase.com. If we uploaded current snapshot of .xcstrings with extractionState set to manual to phrase, would that automatically be set to manual also for every new key created on phrase.com portal or we would need to do that manually after pulling in changes?

Also it would be great to add this behaviour to your documentation as currently it's not clear.

[bikmazefe]

@binovsky I see, we store that information on a per-key basis. So the new keys won't automatically have that attribute, only the existing keys will (as long as they're not created/updated via a .xcstrings upload). Let me check with the team internally and get back to you.

[jablan]

@binovsky would you happen to have a good documentation link for this extractionState attribute? We'd like to better understand what it means exactly and whether it makes sense to introduce a default for it.

[binovsky]

Unfortunately as far as I'm aware Apple doesn't have documentation for xcstrings schema, we just know about this attribute because we can toggle this option when strings catalog is opened in Xcode and you open the attribute inspector pane on the right and then we observed changes in xcstrings file.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/225/?time=820