Explanation of `self` usage during dealloc?
- by Greg
I'm trying to lock down my understanding of proper memory management within Objective-C.
I've gotten into the habit of explicitly declaring self.myProperty rather than just myProperty because I was encountering occasional scenarios where a property would not be set to the reference that I intended.
Now, I'm reading Apple documentation on releasing IBOutlets, and they say that all outlets should be set to nil during dealloc. So, I put this in place as follows and experienced crashes as a result:
- (void)dealloc {
[self.dataModel close];
[self.dataModel release], self.dataModel = nil;
[super dealloc];
}
So, I tried taking out the "self" references, like so:
- (void)dealloc {
[dataModel close];
[dataModel release], dataModel = nil;
[super dealloc];
}
This second system seems to work as expected. However, it has me a bit confused. Why would self cause a crash in that case, when I thought self was a fairly benign reference more used as a formality than anything else? Also, if self is not appropriate in this case, then I have to ask: when should you include self references, and when should you not?
