Delegates and Memory Leaks in iPhone?

Question

Hello all,

I have a tableview(being IBOutlet) and tableviewController in my ViewController

what I do is

//.... allocation for tableviewController self.tableview.delegate = tableviewController;

//now this increases the retain count of tableviewController...

So in deallocation do I need to set the tableview delegate to nil...like

self.tableview.delegate = nil; or self.tableview = nil; // is sufficient to make sure that the retain count of tableviewController get decreased by 1.

Answer 1

The tableView already realeases its delegate in its dealloc method, so you should be ok without having to explicitly set the delegate to nil.

Answer 2

The table view does not retain its delegate:

@property(nonatomic, assign) id<UITableViewDelegate> delegate

The reason is that retaining would likely cause a retain cycle. See Avoiding retain cycles rule #3: "Connection" objects should not retain their target. To keep the delegate alive, you must maintain a reference to it yourself somewhere.