Fix warning "Capturing [an object] strongly in this block is likely to lead to a retain cycle" in ARC-enabled code

Replying to myself:

My understanding of the documentation says that using keyword block and setting the variable to nil after using it inside the block should be ok, but it still shows the warning.

__block ASIHTTPRequest *request = [[ASIHTTPRequest alloc] initWithURL:...

[request setCompletionBlock:^{
    NSDictionary *jsonDictionary = [[CJSONDeserializer deserializer] deserialize:request.responseData error:nil];
    request = nil;
// ....

    }];

Update: got it to work with the keyword '_weak' instead of '_block', and using a temporary variable:

ASIHTTPRequest *_request = [[ASIHTTPRequest alloc] initWithURL:...
__weak ASIHTTPRequest *request = _request;

[request setCompletionBlock:^{
    NSDictionary *jsonDictionary = [[CJSONDeserializer deserializer] deserialize:request.responseData error:nil];
    // ...
    }];

If you want to also target iOS 4, use __unsafe_unretained instead of __weak. Same behavior, but the pointer stays dangling instead of being automatically set to nil when the object is destroyed.

The issue occurs because you're assigning a block to request that has a strong reference to request in it. The block will automatically retain request, so the original request won't deallocate because of the cycle. Make sense?

It's just weird because you're tagging the request object with __block so it can refer to itself. You can fix this by creating a weak reference alongside it.

ASIHTTPRequest *request = [[ASIHTTPRequest alloc] initWithURL:...];
__weak ASIHTTPRequest *wrequest = request;

[request setCompletionBlock:^{
    NSDictionary *jsonDictionary = [[CJSONDeserializer deserializer] deserialize:wrequest.rawResponseData error:nil];
    // ...
    }];