Question

I am working on an iphone application, and although I thought I had a good understanding of memory management, I’m seeing some issues after using the Xcode Analyze function. I have looked at many of the existing questions I could find on here, but I couldn’t find one that was similar to my situation.

CustomerDetailController.h

@interface CustomerDetailController : UITableViewController {
  PTCustomer *customer;
}
@property (nonatomic, retain) PTCustomer *customer;

- (id)initWithCustomer:(PTCustomer *)aCustomer;

CustomerDetailController.m

@synthesize customer;

- (id)initWithCustomer:(PTCustomer *)aCustomer {
  if ((self = [super initWithStyle:UITableViewStyleGrouped]))
  {
    if (aCustomer != nil)
      self.customer = aCustomer;
    else
      self.customer = [[PTCustomer alloc] init];  // This line shows Potential leak of an object allocated on line ##

  }
  return self;
}

If I click on the item marked by the Analyzer, it then says:

1. Method returns an Objective-C object with a +1 retain count

2. Object leaked: allocated object is not referenced later in this execution path and has a retain count of +1

My reasoning behind this is that if a PTCustomer object was not passed in, I want to initialize a new one so that I have it available elsewhere within this class.

What is the correct way to do this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

self.customer is being over-retained.
+1 for alloc of customer
+1 when the property setter retains customer.

Do not retain customer, the property setter will retain it.

Just:

self.customer = [[[PTCustomer alloc] init] autorelease];

But given that this is an init method there is a strong argument that the ivar should be assigned directly:

customer = [[PTCustomer alloc] init];