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iOS Instance variable declaration: best practices?
- Thread starter MacMan988
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It's a question of scope. iVars and properties declared in the header are visible to anybody that includes the header. iVars and properties declared in an "anonymous category" in the .m file are only visible in that file.
Declaring things in the .m file is the rough equivalent to "private" scope in Java or C++. However, with introspection and KVC, nothing is truly private in Objective C.
The problem with putting iVars in the .m file is that then they are not visible to subclasses of the class you re defining.
What I do is to use iVars in the .h file for protected variable storage, and never access it from outside. I then use properties for publicly available storage.
Declaring things in the .m file is the rough equivalent to "private" scope in Java or C++. However, with introspection and KVC, nothing is truly private in Objective C.
The problem with putting iVars in the .m file is that then they are not visible to subclasses of the class you re defining.
What I do is to use iVars in the .h file for protected variable storage, and never access it from outside. I then use properties for publicly available storage.