return new object from method - memory management

[dxm]

Hi all,
I've tried searching for this but 'return' & 'object' gets a lot of results...

Anyway, so in a method in a view controller I am creating a new object:

PdfScrollView *scrollView = [[PdfScrollView alloc] init];

and then I'm returning it to the caller:

return scrollView;

I've got some serious memory leaks in the app, and I've traced them to this method.

Is the above code ok from a memory management point of view, assuming the method that receives the object releases it?
Should I be using autorelease here somewhere? Does that work?

thanks for any tips.

[baja_yu]

It depends on the name of the method. Convention is that methods called (or containing) alloc, new, copy or retain return retained objects and the caller is responsible for releasing them. In other cases methods return autoreleased objects.

This is all covered in the Memory Management Programing Guide in the documentation.

[MattW]

Originally Posted by dxm

Hi all,
I've tried searching for this but 'return' & 'object' gets a lot of results...

Anyway, so in a method in a view controller I am creating a new object:

PdfScrollView *scrollView = [[PdfScrollView alloc] init];

and then I'm returning it to the caller:

return scrollView;

I've got some serious memory leaks in the app, and I've traced them to this method.

Is the above code ok from a memory management point of view, assuming the method that receives the object releases it?
Should I be using autorelease here somewhere? Does that work?

thanks for any tips.

Yes. As long as you make sure that anything calling that function at some point calls release on the pointer it gets, then you won't get a leak.

[dxm]

Cool, thanks guys.