Question

I’m diving into iOS development and I find that for each of my UI controls, I always just blindly declare their @property like so, since that’s how it was done in some tutorial I read when I started learning…

@property (retain, nonatomic) IBOutlet UILabel *lblStatus;

I’m still getting familiar with these attribute types and what they mean, but I find these two attributes allow me to accomplish my goals. Would I ever want to use any @property attributes other than “retain” and “nonatomic” for UI variables?

Thanks in advance for all your help!

Answer 1

NOTE: This answer is more relevant to UI Items in general.

Yes there is other situation where you would want to use the "assign" macro instead of "retain" (Assign is default for now but you get warning at compile-time if you don’t specify it explicitly)

Apple gives a good example of this on one of their tutorial: Advanced UITableViewCell

They only "assign" in order to avoid cycle retains. (each of the view retains the other so they can’t be deallocated).