Is it dangerous to set off an autoreleased NSOperationQueue?

Question

I have a task that takes a rather long time and should run in the background. According to the documentation, this can be done using an NSOperationQueue. However, I do not want to keep a class-global copy of the NSOperationQueue since I really only use it for that one task. Hence, I just set it to autorelease and hope that it won't get released before the task is done. It works.
like this:

NSInvocationOperation *theTask = [NSInvocationOperation alloc];
theTask = [theTask initWithTarget:self
                         selector:@selector(doTask:)
                           object:nil];
NSOperationQueue *operationQueue = [[NSOperationQueue new] autorelease];
[operationQueue addOperation:theTask];
[theTask release];

I am kind of worried, though. Is this guaranteed to work? Or might operationQueue get deallocated at some point and take theTask with it?

Answer 1

There's nothing in the documentation to say what happens when the NSOperationQueue is released. It would be safest to assume there's no guarantee that theTask will get executed.

Answer 2

I would have guessed that an NSOperationQueue releases its tasks when it's released, but I've noticed that the tasks do complete and dealloc even if I release the queue immediately after adding the task. That said, I don't think I'd rely on that behavior - there's more to gain by storing the NSOperationQueue in an instance variable (and releasing it in dealloc). An instance variable will give you a way to call other methods on the queue (cancelAllOperations, setSuspended, etc).

Answer 3

Can't you use the [NSOperation mainQueue] object so that you don't need to worry about autoreleasing it? If you only need to add one task that seems to make the most sense to me.

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/NSOperationQueue_class/Reference/Reference.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40004592-RH2-SW21