purpose of @property in objective c

Question

Look a the below code;

@interface testViewController : UIViewController
{
     int age;
     UIPopoverController *popoverController;
}
@property (nonatomic , ret         


        

Answer 1

It is difficult to advise anything better then official documentation (at least you should start with reading it).

@property (nonatomic , retain ) int age;

Is really supposed to declare setter/getter methods for age ivar, but that line will give compiler error as you can't declare property with retain attribute for non-object types (see docs for more details)

@property (nonatomic , retain ) UIPopoverController *popoverController;

This line does not differ much from the 1st one - it also declares setter and getter methods for popoverController ivar, and automatically synthesized setter will retain popoverController it gets

Answer 2

@synthesize always creates the accessors. In your case:

- (void) setPopoverController:(UIPopoverController *)value;
- (UIPopoverController *) popoverController;

Answer 3

If you have this:

@property (nonatomic , retain ) UIPopoverController *popoverController;

the methods generated by @synthesize will be something like:

-(UIPopoverController*) popoverController
{
    return popoverController;
}

-(void) setPopoverController: (UIPopoverController*) newValue
{
    [newValue retain];
    [popoverController release];
    popoverController = newValue;
}