Question

@implementation GroupedInexedViewController
{
    NSDictionary *names;
}
- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];
    NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"PropertyList"
                                                 ofType:@"plist"];
    NSDictionary *dict = [[NSDictionary alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:path];
    names = dict;
    [dict release];
}

Is deallocating ‘dict’ affects ‘names’? I mean does it deallocate ‘names’ too? I saw in another post that its a bad practice? But why?

Edit: ARC is disabled.

Answer 1

In short, if you are not using ARC, yes: deallocating dict will affect names. This is because you are assigning the names pointer to the single NSDictionary you have allocated.

If you wanted to have names retain the NSDictionary when you dealloc dict, you would need to send dict a retain message:

names = [dict retain];