According to the rules of memory management in a non garbage collected world, one is not supposed to retain a the calling object in a delegate. Scenario goes like this:

I have a class that inherits from UITableViewController and contains a search bar. I run expensive search operations in a secondary thread. This is all done with an NSOperationQueue and subclasses NSOperation instances. I pass the controller as a delegate that adheres to a callback protocol into the NSOperation.

There are edge cases when the application crashes because once an item is selected from the UITableViewController, I dismiss it and thus its retain count goes to 0 and dealloc gets invoked on it. The delegate didn't get to send its message in time as the results are being passed at about the same time the dealloc happens.

Should I design this differently? Should I call retain on my controller from the delegate to ensure it exists until the NSOperation itself is dealloc'd? Will this cause a memory leak? Right now if I put a retain on the controller, the crashes goes away. I don't want to leak memory though and need to understand if there are cases where retaining the delegate makes sense.

Just to recap.

UITableViewController creates an NSOperationQueue and NSOperation that gets embedded into the queue. The UITableViewController passes itself as a delegate to NSOperation. NSOperation calls a method on UITableViewController when it's ready. If I retain the UITableViewController, I guarantee it's there, but I'm not sure if I'm leaking memory. If I only use an assign property, edge cases occur where the UITableViewController gets dealloc'd and objc_msgSend() gets called on an object that doesn't exist in memory and a crash is imminent.