When to call release on NSURLConnection delegate?

Question

When passing a delegate to the a NSUrlConnection object like so:

[[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request delegate:handler];
         


        

Answer 1

the object handler is used to implement connectionDidFinishLoading didReceiveData etc. I make a lot of calls to a number of web services and instead of creating one object for each, I have a central class for all that stuff:

@interface DataService : NSObject {} 

- (void) search:(NSString *) name byAddress:(NSString *)address; 

@end 

so the implementation of that method creates the delegate to pass:

SearchDelegate *delegate = [[SearchDelegate alloc] init]; 
[self sendRequestToUrl:urlString withJson:jsonString andHandler:delegate];

what I am seeing in Instruments is that there is a memory leak on the SearchDelegate... so I think it is actually being retain'ed.

Tinkering a bit I changed my sendRequestToUrlMethod to have this:

// http code setup blah...

[[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request delegate:handler];
[handler release];

and this seems to have gotten ridden of memory leak being reported in Instruments.