I have a method that occasionally crashes.
-(void)foo{
[self doSomething];
[self.delegate didFinish];
[self doSomethingElse];
}
-doSomething works correctly, then I call to a delegate -didFinish. Within -didFinish, the reference to this object might be set to nil, releasing it under ARC. When the method crashes, it does so on -doSomethingElse. My assumption was that self would be strong within a method, allowing the function to complete. Is self weak or strong? Is there documentation on this? What would the reasoning be for it being strong or weak?
Edit
Upon being inspired by some of the answers below, I did some investigation. The actual cause of the crash in my case was that the NSNotificationCenter does not retain the observer in any case. Mike Weller indicates below that callers of methods should retain the object while it is being called in order to prevent the case that I described above, however it appears that NSNotificationCenter ignores this issue, and always maintains a weak reference to the observer. In other words:
-(void)setupNotification{
//observer is weakly referenced when added to NSNotificationCenter
[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self
selector:@selector(handleNotification:)
name:SomeNotification object:nil];
}
//handle the notification
-(void)handleNotification:(id)notification{
//owner has reference so this is fine
[self doSomething];
//call back to the owner/delegate, owner sets reference to nil
[self.delegate didFinish];
//object has been dealloc'ed, crash
[self doSomethingElse];
}
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