Objective-C Basic Class question

Question

So I'm a bit rusty getting back into programming and I can't seem to find a good reference for understanding the structure for what I am trying to achieve. So, without further ado I am looking at creating and Class object such as.

#import Assets.h

@interface MainRecord: NSObject {
    Assets* assets;
    ...
}
...
@end

Having a class object within a class, do i need to initialize when the object is created in main? I want to make sure each instance created for MainRecord will always be associated with it's Assets.(in the future these will be written to a file) All of which is mainly for readability and ease of adding objects to this class.

Answer 1

I recommend reading (at least parts of) The Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language, a guide published by Apple. The section called "Defining a Class" will answer the bulk of your questions.

Basically, you don't initialize instance variables in main() — the class defines methods that handle its own variables. (This is common practice for object-oriented programming languages.) In Objective-C you initialize instance variables in an -(id)init method and release them in -(void)dealloc method to avoid leaking memory. For example, see all the -initWith... methods in NSString.