Bad-practice to retain 'self'?

Question

I have a simple query that I'd like cleared up by someone... Is it bad-practice to retain self?

I have a server request object that I'd like to make. I'd like to be able to use it in the following fashion:

ARequest *request = [ARequest request: someParam];
request.delegate = self;
[request begin];

In order for the object not to self destruct as soon as the autorelease pool is drained, I imagine I need to call a retain in it's init method and then a release once the server response has been received, processed and delivered to it's delegate.

However, something is raising a warning bell in my head with this approach. Better ways to do it?

Answer 1

There is nothing wrong with retaining self, as long as you release it at some well-defined point in accordance with normal memory management protocol. If an object requires itself to exist until some condition is met, it should take responsibility for that, in the same way as it does for any other object it requires to continue existing.

Introducing otherwise extraneous manager objects or foisting the responsibility off on the object’s owner for superstitious reasons would be the real anti-pattern here.

(The equivalent approach in garbage-collected code would be for the object to exclude itself from garbage collection while results are pending, or root it through a collection of some sort if you dislike that idea.)