I\'m following along with this useful looking answer to my question.
It seems to be working, but here are two questions I have:
Yes, you need to release that object. See the Memory Management Programming Guide for Cocoa. Basically, if you ever create an object with a method name that begins with alloc
or new
or contains copy
, you become an owner of the object and are responsible for freeing it later. Only in the case where you know you're going to need the object up until program termination is it ok not to free it, in which case the operating system reclaims the memory when your app terminates.
If you only need the object within a small scope, you can send it the autorelease
message. This will add it to the autorelease pool. The autorelease pool periodically sends a release
message to each object in it. It's kind of complicated; see the section on autorelease pools. For example:
In this case, though, because NSURLConnection
s are asynchronous, autoreleasing won't work. You don't know exactly when it's going to call back into your object with data, so you want to make sure the object hasn't been released yet. The only way to be sure is to know exactly when you're done with the object, and then send it a release
message yourself.
All of the various init*
functions return a pointer to the given object, so you can just do:
NSURLConnection *connection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request delegate:self];
...
// when done with connection:
[connection release];