Should IBOutlets be strong or weak under ARC?

Question

I am developing exclusively for iOS 5 using ARC. Should IBOutlets to UIViews (and subclasses) be strong or weak?

Answer 1

In iOS development NIB loading is a little bit different from Mac development.

In Mac development an IBOutlet is usually a weak reference: if you have a subclass of NSViewController only the top-level view will be retained and when you dealloc the controller all its subviews and outlets are freed automatically.

UiViewController use Key Value Coding to set the outlets using strong references. So when you dealloc your UIViewController, the top view will automatically deallocated, but you must also deallocate all its outlets in the dealloc method.

In this post from the Big Nerd Ranch, they cover this topic and also explain why using a strong reference in IBOutlet is not a good choice (even if it is recommended by Apple in this case).