Managing memory for popover controllers and their content views

When the user taps on the right callout accessory on开发者_开发百科 my map view's pin's callout I am showing a popovercontroller with a view inside it. I am maintaining 2 retained properties in the mapcontroller for this. I am also releasing these properties in dealloc of the mapcontroller - which probably never happens.

When the user deselects the annotation view I want all this memory released, does assigning nil suffice?

- (void)mapView:(MKMapView *)mapView didDeselectAnnotationView:(MKAnnotationView *)view
{
    [self.informationViewController.view removeFromSuperview]; //remove from popovercontroller
    self.informationViewController = nil; 
    popoverController = nil;
}

Yes, it should. This sets the reference of the object to nil which in turn releases the object. I'm no expert on memory management though, so if anyone wants to downvote/correct me, feel free.

I believe you also will need to release the objects.

Wouldn't just assigning nil only remove your pointer to the object in memory? I suspect the object would still reside in memory and still have a retain counter assigned to it, so it will not be removed from memory until it's retain count was decremented.

Further, by assigning your pointer to nil before you released the object, I also would suspect that you will have created a memory leak because the attempt to call release in the dealloc of the controller will not actually release the object.

I'm not 100% sure about this, but ... here is also a link to the Memory Management Programming Guide.

Also, for the future, if you want to be sure, you could run your application using the Leaks performance tool, it should show you where you're leaking memory and what objects are currently allocated in memory, etc...

I could try to setup the scenario in a test project real quick and monitor it using Leaks and update my answer later also.