Why do I need to write @synthesize when I provide getter and setter?

Question

So the auto synthesize of properties is awesome. However, when you provide both a getter and a setter, you get an error.

@property (strong, nonatomic) NSArra         


        

Answer 1

I did some testing:

Under recent Objective-c convention, you do not need to synthesize properties.

If you do

@property (strong, nonatomic) Business* theBiz;

iOs will automatically create a private ivar variable called _theBiz;

If you only implement a getter or a setter it seems to work just fine:

-(void)setTheBiz:(Business *)theBiz
{
    _theBiz = theBiz;
}

However, if you declare BOTH, even if one of them are just empty function you'll get compile error.

-(void)setTheBiz:(Business *)theBiz
{
    _theBiz = theBiz;
}

-(Business *) theBiz
{

}

When you implement BOTH getter and setter you will get a compile error saying that therre is no such thing as _theBiz.

That can be easily fixed by adding:

@synthesize theBiz = _theBiz;

But that defeat the whole point of this awesome new feature of Objective-c.

I wonder if this is by design or I am just missing something. What does apple thing?

My best guess is it's a bug.

Guillaume's answer doesn't address that fact.

He said that

at least one method has been synthesized

It seems that _theBiz would have been created if only ONE of getter or setter is set. When both are set it's no longer created and that must be a bug. In fact, none have to be set at all and the ivar will still be created.

The only way to fix that is to explicitly do

@synthesize theBiz = _theBiz;