iphone - iVar property, access via self?

Question

I understand that when accessing setter / getter methods for properties I should be using [self setThisValue:@"a"]; rather than thisValue = @"a"; However with the example below I can see that adding self documents that I am sending a message to an iVar property rather than a locally scoped variable, but does it do anything else in this case?

@interface CustomController : UIViewController {
    NSMutableArray *foundList;
}
@property(nonatomic, retain) NSMutableArray *foundList;
@end

.

[[self foundList] addObject:eachObject]; // I usually write this ...

OR

[foundList addObject:eachObject];

gary.

Answer 1

If you have a defined property for an ivar, you should use it rather than accessing the ivar directly. That allows subclasses to override the setter/getter and do something different to just fetching the value from the ivar.

The only exception is in init methods and dealloc.