Question

I have a class that accesses the address book, if I have the following code then I get warnings from the analyzer, one is for a leak in the init method and another is saying the class doesn’t own the object when its releasing it in the dealloc.

I presume the 2nd warning is due to declaring the address book ref as assign? But its not possible to make it strong as this generates a compilation warning.
What is the correct way of dealing with the address book as a property?

@property (assign, nonatomic)   ABAddressBookRef                addressBook;

..
- (id) init
{
    self = [super init];
    if (self)
    {
        if (ABAddressBookCreateWithOptions)
        {
            // iOS 6 onwards
            self.addressBook = ABAddressBookCreateWithOptions(NULL, NULL);
        }
        else
        {
            // < iOS 6
            self.addressBook = ABAddressBookCreate();
        }
    }
    return self;
}


- (void) dealloc
{
    if (self.addressBook)
    {
        CFRelease(self.addressBook);
    }
}

Answer 1

It’s a false positive, you are correctly balancing the initial +1 of the retainCount with a the CFRelease call in the dealloc method.

You can get rid of the warnings by using the ivar instead of the property to initialize and release the pointer.

- (id) init {
    // ...
    _addressBook = ABAddressBookCreateWithOptions(NULL, NULL);
    //...
}

- (void)dealloc { 
    CFRelease(_addressBook); //assuming that _addressBook is your synthesized ivar
}