Question

I am new to iOS development.

I have property as follows,

@property(nonatomic,retain)NSMutableArray *dataArray;

I am doing the following, to alloc it

self.dataArray=[[NSMutable alloc]init];

In the dealloc I am doing the following

-(void)delloc{
  [dataArray release];
  [super dealloc];
}

But I am getting memory leak for my array initialization.However , it doesn’t create the

leak when I don’t use self. But I wonder is it a write approach to initialise the array

without using self. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

You’re getting a leak because the dataArray property is declared with retain, which means that when you use self (thus you use the setter), your retain count goes up to 2 and you only release it once. On the other hand, if you only use the ivar, the retain count is 1 (because of alloc) and you release it once, which is fine. To avoid the memory leak in the first situation, autorelease it like this.

self.data = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init] autorelease];

That will balance the retain count. As for access, except for inside the dealloc method, try to use self (setter and getter)

You should read the memory management docs, first thing to start with when developing for Cocoa Touch.

Also, why don’t you use ARC?