Question

I am using custom delegate objects to do some cleanup tasks after a request finishes. ASIHTTPRequest doesn’t retain delegates so I can’t autorelease them. Right now this is how I am allocating and releasing the delegates.

App Delegate

MyDelegate *delegate = [[MyDelegate alloc] init];   
ASIHTTPRequest *request = [ASIHTTPRequest requestWithURL:url];
[request setDelegate:delegate];

MyDelegate.m

- (void)requestFinished:(ASIHTTPRequest *)request
{
    [self release];
}

- (void)requestFailed:(ASIHTTPRequest *)request
{
    [self release];
}

Is there a better way to do this? Having the delegates release themselves seems ugly and Xcode’s build and analyze feels uncomfortable with what I’m doing.

Answer 1

A simple approach would be to maintain a mutable set of delgates for each active request in your main controller (the app delegate, in this case):

@interface MyAppController
{
    NSMutableSet * activeDelegates;
}
@end

@implementation MyAppController

- (id)init
{
    if ((self = [super init]) == nil) { return nil; }
    activeDelegates = [[NSMutableSet alloc] initWithCapacity:0];
    return self;
}

- (void)dealloc
{
    [activeDelegates release];
}

- (void)createRequest
{
    MyDelegate *delegate = [[MyDelegate alloc] init];
    [activeDelegates addObject:delegate];
    [delegate release];

    ASIHTTPRequest *request = [ASIHTTPRequest requestWithURL:url];
    [request setDelegate:self];

    ...
}

- (void)requestFinished:(ASIHTTPRequest *)request
{
    MyDelegate *delegate = [request delegate];
    [delegate doSomething];
    [activeDelegates removeObject:delegate];
{

- (void)requestFailed:(ASIHTTPRequest *)request
{
    [activeDelegates removeObject:[request delegate]];
}

@end