Error: Cannot read property 'replace' of undefined when building iOS Cordova

Question

I created a cordova project using cordova create project hello com.hello Hello.

And added iOS platform using cordova platform add iOS. And

Answer 1

I had the same error. For me I traced this down into a bug in platforms/ios/cordova/node_modules/ios-sim/src/lib.js

getdevicetypes: function(args) {
...
    list.devicetypes.forEach(function(device) {
        name_id_map[ filterDeviceName(device.name) ] = device.id;
    });

    list = [];
    var remove = function(runtime) {
        // remove "iOS" prefix in runtime, remove prefix "com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType." in id
        list.push(util.format('%s, %s', name_id_map[ deviceName ].replace(/^com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType./, ''), runtime.replace(/^iOS /, '')));
    };

The error always occured as "TypeError: Cannot read property 'replace' of undefined" in lib.js:289

list.push(util.format('%s, %s', name_id_map[ deviceName ].replace(/^com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType./, ''), runtime.replace(/^iOS /, '')));

So I inserted some debug code:

    list.devicetypes.forEach(function(device) {
        console.log('test 1 ' + device.name);
        console.log('test 2 ' + filterDeviceName(device.name));
        name_id_map[ filterDeviceName(device.name) ] = device.id;
    });

This worked for me. Good luck.

    list = [];
    var remove = function(runtime) {
        // remove "iOS" prefix in runtime, remove prefix "com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType." in id
        console.log('remove 1 ' + runtime);
        console.log('remove 2 ' + deviceName);
        console.log('remove 3 ' + name_id_map[ deviceName ]);
        list.push(util.format('%s, %s', name_id_map[ deviceName ].replace(/^com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType./, ''), runtime.replace(/^iOS /, '')));
    };

and got the following output:

test 1 iPhone 5
test 2 iPhone 5
test 1 iPad Pro (9.7-inch)
test 2 iPad Pro (9.7 inch)
remove 1 iOS 10.2
remove 2 iPhone 5
remove 3 com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType.iPhone-5
remove 1 iOS 10.2
remove 2 iPad Pro (9.7-inch)
remove 3 undefined

Notice how filterDeviceName removed the minus character while filling the hash. When the value is retrieved again, the filter is not applied and the program fails.

Bug fix: apply the filter while writing to and reading from the hash.

 list.push(util.format('%s, %s', name_id_map[ filterDeviceName(deviceName) ].replace(/^com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType./, ''), runtime.replace(/^iOS /, '')));

Answer 2

I have run following commands and it solves my problem:

cd project_dir

sudo npm install ios-sim@latest

Answer 3

Another option is to use a cordova-ios version with the ios-sim patch already implemented

cordova platform add https://github.com/apache/cordova-ios.git#4.4.0-ios-sim

Beware that this is not an official release of Apache Cordova, this will be included in next 4.4.1 version.