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Re: autorelease and distributed objects

Well, if no-one else'll answer it, I guess I'll just have to. :)

NSEnumerator *allDistantObjects= [ ... ];
id theDistantObject;
[theDictionary autorelease];
while(theDistantObject= [allDistantObjects nextObject])
{
[theDistantObject updateWithDictionary: theDictionary];
}

In other word, is it safe to autorelease the dictionary before I send it out, it should be right since its a copy anyways. Would it also be safe to instead of autorelease it, release it after all the messages are sent? I would assume so but I wanted to make sure.

This should be safe, since your autoreleased object is [in practice, at least] guaranteed to be around until the end of the current method, even if you do tricksy runloop stuff in it.

[myObject beginEditing];
[myObject setObject: someObject forKey: @"hello"];
[myObject setObject: someObject2 forKey: @"bye"];
[myObject endEditing];

[distantObject updateWithDictionary: [myObject editedProperties]];

My idea is that internall, myObject would have a editedProperties dictionary, and would set someObject to @"hello", etc. Then, when you call endEditing, I plan on sending that dictionary the autorelease message:

- (void)beginEditing
{
editedProperties= [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];
}

- (void)endEditing
{
[editedProperties autorelease];
}

Is this "safe"? Or is there a chance of the editedProperties being deallocated before I send it out.

This one's trickier... I think you'll find in practice that your code would work, since it's no different from returning an autoreleased object. However, it is conceptually different, and since it's not really explicit what's going on inside your black-box "myObject", some other developer unaware of this trick may come afoul of it.

Better to return the autoreleased dictionary (or whatever it is) in the endEditing method, so you can pass it directly to your distant object and handle it explicitly as you would any other method. If you can't do that, you'll need to delay your [auto]release until deallocation. You could also perhaps reuse the same dictionary for each edit, which might save you a bit of overhead in malloc and other such things.

Wade Tregaskis (aim: wadetregaskis)
-- Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
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