What's the retain-release convention in this scenario

FROM : Sarat Kongara
DATE : Sat Nov 02 16:58:13 2002

Hi,
I am trying to follow (religiously) the retain-release conventions in Cocoa to help myself. I thought I got it all covered until one fine day I got a bug (Signal 11). Actually this is my first Cocoa app, I am planning on spending  the whole of Sunday going over code of every method in all my classes.

I actually found the bug, thanks to the crash report logs that get generated in /Library/Logs/CrashReporter. It was tough to find this one because the app was crashing when I was doing some specific function but not always, I had to do it multiple times and it crashes randomly ofcourse always while doing the same operation.

Here is the code

- (IBAction)deleteItems:(id)sender {

  // some code here


  NSString *rowText = [selectedItem itemName];
  NSString *parentName = [[selectedItem parent] itemName];

  // some code here
 
  [self deleteCategoryNamed:rowText inParentNamed:parentName];

// some code here
}

- (void)deleteCategoryNamed:(NSString *)cName inParentNamed:(NSString *)bName {
  // code here
 
  if([[entry name] isEqualToString:bName])  // sometimes crashing code

  // code here

}

I think the reason is bName in deleteCategoryNamed:InParentNamed is not valid sometimes.
So I fixed this by changing deleteItems: to this.

- (IBAction)deleteItems:(id)sender {

  // some code here


  NSString *rowText = [[selectedItem itemName] retain];
  NSString *parentName = [[[selectedItem parent] itemName] retain];

  // some code here
 
  [self deleteCategoryNamed:rowText inParentNamed:parentName];

// some code here
[rowText release];
[parentName release];
}

Should I
1. Also retain and release cName & bName in "deleteCategoryNamed: inParentNamed:"
2. Or its only enough to retain and release in "deleteCategoryNamed: inParentNamed:"
3. Can I expect the return value of a method call to be valid in the calling method.

All advice, feedback is really appreciated. Thanks.

Sarat Kongara
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