Has Xcode 6 changed the rules for accessing IBOutlets?

Question

I was under the impression when designing views in IB, you should always make your IBOutlet's weak. In the latest Xcode 6 I have started to get a strange warning on new projects.

This seems new to me, so I decided to try this:

This pattern loosely follows what Apple is having us do with accessing swift optionals. (the if-let pattern)

So, my question is:

"What has changed? Should we be making our outlets strong? Maybe we are being nudged into changing our outlet access patterns? or maybe this is just an Xcode 6.1 bug and will be resolved later?"

I am not sure what the solution is and would love to hear discussion on this.

Thanks

UPDATE: Blah, looks like going through the warnings and it looks like the "sending messages to weak pointers" warning was turned on, not sure why, but that was the problem.

Answer 1

It's generally considered safe to let an IBOutlet property be weak if it refers to something in the view hierarchy owned by the nib's main object. In that case, you have a strong reference to the root view of that hierarchy, and that in turn has strong references to all its subviews.

You should use a strong reference instead if, for example, you plan to remove a subviews from that hierarchy and replace it later/elsewhere.

The compiler can't tell how your nib/storyboard is set up, or know what your plans for an outlet variable might be, so that warning is broadly applied.