Autorelease scope

Question

I was wondering how the autorelese works on the iPhone. I though that once you send an autorelease to an object it is guaranteed to be retained in till the

Answer 1

When you call autorelease, you give ownership of the object to the current autorelease pool. The run loop creates a new autorelease pool before it dispatches an event (such as applicationDidFinishLaunching:) and destroys that pool when the event finishes.

When you give ownership of your LoginViewController to the autorelease pool, it gets released just after the applicationDidFinishLaunching: returns. When the view controller deallocates itself, it removes its view from the superview (your window in this case).

Your application delegate should keep ownership of the LoginViewController and release it in the app delegate's dealloc method (or when you're done with your login and have moved on to another view).