Question

I have a task that takes a rather long time and should run in the background. According to the documentation, this can be done using an NSOperationQueue. However, I do not want to keep a class-global copy of the NSOperationQueue since I really only use it for that one task. Hence, I just set it to autorelease and hope that it won’t get released before the task is done. It works.
like this:

NSInvocationOperation *theTask = [NSInvocationOperation alloc];
theTask = [theTask initWithTarget:self
                         selector:@selector(doTask:)
                           object:nil];
NSOperationQueue *operationQueue = [[NSOperationQueue new] autorelease];
[operationQueue addOperation:theTask];
[theTask release];

I am kind of worried, though. Is this guaranteed to work? Or might operationQueue get deallocated at some point and take theTask with it?

Answer 1

There’s nothing in the documentation to say what happens when the NSOperationQueue is released. It would be safest to assume there’s no guarantee that theTask will get executed.