Correct way to set up an addressBook instance variable?

Maybe someone can answer this one easily. I working on an iphone app where to get info for each row in cellForRowAtIndexPath I was creating a new address book each time calling:

ABAddressBookRef addressBook = ABAddressBookCreate();

This works fine other than it's slow and does not feel right to be creating a new ab for each row. So I created an addressBook instance variable but can't seem to use it without crashing. (Program received signal: “EXC_BAD_ACCESS”.) I imagine that I'm not setting it up right, but have have had no luck finding anything specifically about this in the documentation.

Thanks a million in advance to anyone who can help.

In my .h file I did this:

ABAddressBookRef addressBook;


@property(nonatomic, readwrite) ABAddressBookRef addressBook;

Then in my .m file:

-(id)initWithStyle:(UITableViewStyle)style
{
    if (self = [super initWithStyle:style]) {

        addressBook = ABAddressBookCreate();
    }

    return self;
}

Answers

When do you release the addressBook by CFRelease(addressBook) ? If the memory is not enough, the ABAddressBookCreate() will return a nil object. The C-based addressBook.framework API cannot work with nil object, and it will crash with "EXC_BAD_ACCESS".

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