Question

In IPhone Development ObjC , I wonder what is the right approach for functions to return some values in Dictionaries or Arrays. I mean should they return autorelease objects, but wouldn’t it be bad if I am using too many functions to return values, like getUserRecordsFromDB() function will return all the user records, so should they return me autorelease objects? also when I am calling them multiple times, suppose with a span of 4 seconds to get the newely updated data. Can somebody let me an ideal scanario of how to get data from a function called frequently in the flow of program, and not leaking the memory.

Answer 1

We should always return autorelease objects from functions and ensure they get released by setting up Autorelease pool in the calling function as follows

NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

// Call database function here...

[pool release];

Refer the auto release pool documentation here