Question

I have been slowly learning iPhone development and seem to keep hitting walls where I can’t figure out how to do what I want to do the right way 🙁

Basically, I want a class that handles all interactions with the data layer, for example, getting a mutable array of some list of objects from the data store.

This is pretty trivial in other languages where you have a garbage collector, but in Objective-C on the iPhone, I’m not sure what to do.

This is an example method on a DataFactory class we were creating. Note the comment on where we are not sure when to release….

- (NSMutableArray*)fetchAllDrivers{

    NSMutableArray *results = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];;

    if (self.appDelegate != nil) {
        NSManagedObjectContext *context = [self.appDelegate managedObjectContext];

        NSFetchRequest *request = [[NSFetchRequest alloc] init];
        NSEntityDescription *entity = [NSEntityDescription entityForName:@"Person" inManagedObjectContext:context];
        [request setEntity: entity];

        NSSortDescriptor *sortDescriptor = [[NSSortDescriptor alloc] initWithKey:@"lastName" ascending:NO];
        NSArray *sortDescriptors = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects: sortDescriptor, nil];
        [request setSortDescriptors: sortDescriptors];
        [sortDescriptors release];
        [sortDescriptor release];

        NSError *error;
        results = [[context executeFetchRequest:request error:&error] mutableCopy];
        if (results == nil) {
            //something went wrong
        }

        //Where should this be released???  Certainly not here!
        [results release];

        [request release];
    }
    else {
        [NSException raise:@"Can't fetch b/c app delgate is nil!" format: @"!!!"];    
    }

    return results;
}

Calling code, related to my comment:

NSMutableArray* arr = [dataFactory fetchAllDrivers];
[arr retain];
//Some code  where we use arr
[arr release];

Answer 1

Following naming conventions, your fetchAllDrivers should return an autoreleased object.

- (NSMutableArray*)fetchAllDrivers
{

    if (!self.appDelegate) {
        // Big Problems Raise exception immediately if you want...
        return nil; 
    }

    NSManagedObjectContext *context = [self.appDelegate managedObjectContext];

    NSFetchRequest *request = [[NSFetchRequest alloc] init];
    NSEntityDescription *entity = [NSEntityDescription entityForName:@"Person" inManagedObjectContext:context];
    [request setEntity: entity];

    NSSortDescriptor *sortDescriptor = [[NSSortDescriptor alloc] initWithKey:@"lastName" ascending:NO];
    NSArray *sortDescriptors = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects: sortDescriptor, nil];
    [request setSortDescriptors: sortDescriptors];
    [sortDescriptors release];
    [sortDescriptor release];


    NSError *error = nil;

    NSMutableArray *results = [[NSMutableArray alloc] initWithArray:[context executeFetchRequest:request error:&error] copyItems:YES];

    if (error) {
        // Something went wrong
        [results release];
        // Error handling code here
        [request release];
        return nil;
    }

    [request release];
    return [results autorelease];

}