Question

I have an Objective-C NSMutableDictionary declared inside a class’s @interface section, with getter/setter methods, like so:

@interface myClass : NSObject
{
     NSMutableDictionary *dict;
}
- (void) setDict: (NSMutableDictionary *) newDict;
- (NSMutableDictionary *) dict;

Inside some of my @implementation methods I want to modify dict. I’d like to stick to standard Obj-C idiom and modify it “properly”. Is it OK to modify it like this, using the getter but not the setter:

[[self dict] removeObjectForKey:@"myKey"];

…or is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

That’ll work, but why not do:

[dict removeObjectForKey:@"myKey"];

Inside a class’s implementation, you have direct access to the instance variables, and using them directly is idiomatic Objective-C.