How to handle retain count for controllers saved in AppDelegate?

MyAppDelegate is doing some background stuff and needs to refresh several views during this time, so I am saving a reference to each controller that gets created.

@interface MyAppDelegate : NSObject <UIApplicationDelegate> {
    SomethingController *currentSomethingController;
}
@property (nonatomic, retain) SomethingController *currentSomethingController;

This is done to open the controller:

- (void)openSomethingController {
    MyAppDelegate * app = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate];
    app.currentSomethingController = [[SomethingController alloc] init];
    [self presentModalViewController:app.currentSomethingController animated:NO];
}

And this is called inside the controller to close it:

- (void)dismissSelf
{
    MyAppDelegate * app = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate];
    [app.currentSomethingController release];
    app.currentSomethingController = nil;
[self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:NO];
}

In MyAppDelegate the controllers is sending messages to the controller:

- (void)longRunningBackgroundTask {
    [currentSomethingController performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(updateData) withObject:nil waitUntilDone:YES];
}

If I do Product->Analyse I get "potential leak" and "incorrect decrement" warnings. What would be the right way to do this or assuming my approach is okay, how do I tell the analysis tool to ignore those lines?

Solution

Even though your code seems fine, why are you doing that? It can lead to confusion to an outsider reading your code, also you should not explicitly call release on a property, you should just let the memory managment occur in the property itself, so rewrite your code like

- (void)openSomethingController {
    MyAppDelegate * app = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate];
     SomethingController *controller=[[SomethingController alloc] init];
    app.currentSomethingController = controller;
    [controller release];
    [self presentModalViewController:app.currentSomethingController animated:NO];
}

and then

- (void)dismissSelf
{
    MyAppDelegate * app = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate];
    app.currentSomethingController = nil;
   [self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:NO];
}