Crash on second address book (contacts) lookup

Question

Update:

I believe the problem lies somewhere in how I am storing the reference to ABRecordRef. I am currently just hanging onto the value as delivered to peoplePickerNavigationController:shouldContinueAfterSelectingPerson:property:identifier: and not CFRetaining it or anything. It's unclear from the documentation if it needs to be retained.

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I'm working on an iPhone app and it interfaces with the address book using the AddressBook and AddressBookUI frameworks. I'm using the ABPeoplePickerNavigationController to present a contact list to the user to choose, and am capturing the resultant ABRecordRef as an instance variable on a custom class.

This is all working fine on the first use. However, the second time I pick someone from the contacts (even a different person), my app blows up with EXC_BAD_ACCESS on a call to ABRecordCopyValue. I am logging the pointers and they are definitely different each time a contact is selected (even if the same contact twice).

I fail to understand how this reference could be deallocated. A memory leak sure, but why does it work fine the first time and not the second?

Here's the actual call it's dying on:

- (NSString*)displayName {
    return CFBridgingRelease( ABRecordCopyValue( self.contact, kABPersonFirstNameProperty ) );
}

Here's some debug output if it's helpful at all:

Printing description of self->_contact:
(ABRecordRef) _contact = 0x1f582dc0

(lldb) expr (CFTypeRef)ABRecordCopyValue(self.contact, kABPersonFirstNameProperty)
error: Execution was interrupted, reason: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (code=1, address=0xd1f57cc1).
The process has been returned to the state before execution.

Answer 1

- (BOOL)peoplePickerNavigationController:(ABPeoplePickerNavigationController *)peoplePicker
      shouldContinueAfterSelectingPerson:(ABRecordRef)person
{
    [self displayPerson:person];
    [self dismissViewControllerAnimated:YES completion:nil];

    return NO;
}

you returning NO ?

Try checking to see if the value exists maybe

ie

- (void)displayPerson:(ABRecordRef)person
{
    NSString* companyName = (__bridge_transfer NSString*)ABRecordCopyValue(person, kABPersonOrganizationProperty);
    NSString* name = (__bridge_transfer NSString*)ABRecordCopyValue(person, kABPersonFirstNameProperty);
    NSString* display = @"";

    if (companyName) {
        display = companyName;
    } else if (name) {
        display = name;
    } else {
        UIAlertView *alertView = [[UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle:@"No Details For Contact"
                                                            message:@"Please update contact with company and/or first name"
                                                           delegate:nil
                                                  cancelButtonTitle:@"Dismiss"
                                                  otherButtonTitles:nil];
        [alertView show];
    }
}

Answer 2

Turns out all I needed was to CFRetain( person ) and everything's happy go lucky again. I also added a dealloc to my class to clean up the pointer when the object goes away:

- (void)dealloc {
    CFRelease( _contact );
}

My code now runs smoothly and the static analyser is happy (not that it caught the leak anyway).