Proper way of passing a primitive argument with an NSTimer

Question

I'm using a basic timer that calls this method:

- (void) refresh:(id)obj
{
    if (obj == YES) doSomething;
}

I want to call this method from certain areas of my code and also from a timer

[NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:refreshInterval
                            target:self
                            selector:@selector(refresh:) 
                            userInfo:nil 
                            repeats:YES];

When I put YES as the argument for the userInfo parameter, I get an EXC_BAD_ACCESS error; why is this?

Can someone help me do this the right way so that there is no ugly casting and such?

Answer 1

The userInfo parameter must be an object; it is typed id. YES is a primitive, namely the value 1. In order to make sure the userInfo object does not get deallocated, the timer retains it. So, when you passed YES, NSTimer was doing [(id)YES retain]. Try that in your own code and see what happens. :-P

As the Documentation states, the selector you give the method must have the signature

- (void)timerFireMethod:(NSTimer*)theTimer

This means you can't have an NSTimer invoke just any method—not directly at least. You can make a special method with the above signature which in turn invokes any method you want though.

So, say you have a method called refresh:, and you want to call it every so often, passing it YES. You can do this like so:

// somewhere
{
    [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:refreshInterval
                                     target:self
                                   selector:@selector(invokeRefresh:)
                                   userInfo:nil
                                    repeats:YES];
}

- (void)invokeRefresh:(NSTimer *)timer {
    [self refresh:YES];
}

- (void)refresh:(BOOL)flag {
    if (flag) {
        // do something
    }
}