Objective-C Getter Memory Management

Posted by Marian André on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Marian André
Published on 2010-05-16T21:21:03Z Indexed on 2010/05/16 21:30 UTC
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I'm fairly new to Objective-C and am not sure how to correctly deal with memory management in the following scenario:

I have a Core Data Entity with a to-many relationship for the key "children". In order to access the children as an array, sorted by the column "position", I wrote the model class this way:

@interface AbstractItem :  NSManagedObject  
{
    NSArray * arrangedChildren;
}

@property (nonatomic, retain) NSSet * children;
@property (nonatomic, retain) NSNumber * position;
@property (nonatomic, retain) NSArray * arrangedChildren;

@end


@implementation AbstractItem

@dynamic children;
@dynamic position;
@synthesize arrangedChildren;

- (NSArray*)arrangedChildren
{
    NSArray* unarrangedChildren = [[self.children allObjects] retain];
    NSSortDescriptor* sortDescriptor = [[NSSortDescriptor alloc] initWithKey:@"position" ascending:YES];
    [arrangedChildren release];
    arrangedChildren = [unarrangedChildren sortedArrayUsingDescriptors:[NSArray arrayWithObject:sortDescriptor]];
    [sortDescriptor release];
    [unarrangedChildren release];
    return [arrangedChildren retain];
}

@end

I'm not sure whether or not to retain unarrangedChildren and the returned arrangedChildren (first and last line of the arrangedChildren getter). Does the NSSet allObjects method already return a retained array? It's probably too late and I have a coffee overdose.

I'd be really thankful if someone could point me in the right direction. I guess I'm missing vital parts of memory management knowledge and I will definitely look into it thoroughly.

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