WatchOS: SDWebImageLottieCoder load new animation while watch app is running - swift

Question

I'm following this tutorial to use Lottie animations library on WatchOS. It's working until I try to change the animation while the app is running. Even though I change it, the animation stays the same until I run the watch app from Xcode. (If I simply close the app and open again it doesn't change.)
What I tried:
clearing the cache from the watch file system
clearing URLCache
clearing SDImageCache memory and disk

Answer 1

You were right that caching causes your problem. However, you didn't go deep enough.
You use SDWebImageLottieCoder to display your animations, which in turn uses rlottie.
According to their readme:
"rlottie is a platform independent standalone c++ library for rendering vector based animations and art in realtime."
The point is that the animation is cached by the rlottie framework, so neither clearing URLCache nor SDImageCache will solve this.
The easiest way to solve this is to modify the code in the rlottie C++ library. In your Xcode project navigate to Pods -> Pods -> librlottie and look for the following file: lottieanimation_capi.cpp
In this file search for the following code:
RLOTTIE_API Lottie_Animation_S *lottie_animation_from_data(const char *data, const char *key, const char *resourcePath)
{
if (auto animation = Animation::loadFromData(data, key, resourcePath) ) {
Lottie_Animation_S *handle = new Lottie_Animation_S();
handle->mAnimation = std::move(animation);
return handle;
} else {
return nullptr;
}
}
This is the code that loads your Lottie animation on your device and is responsible for caching. loadFromData takes an additional fourth parameter called cachePolicy, which is a boolean, and nothing is passed for it in this case.
So if you don't want your animation to be cached then pass false into this call.
Modify the code to this and it should work:
RLOTTIE_API Lottie_Animation_S *lottie_animation_from_data(const char *data, const char *key, const char *resourcePath)
{
if (auto animation = Animation::loadFromData(data, key, resourcePath, false) ) {
Lottie_Animation_S *handle = new Lottie_Animation_S();
handle->mAnimation = std::move(animation);
return handle;
} else {
return nullptr;
}
}