Lazy initialization not working iPhone

Question

So I have a lot of custom objects that could contain a lot of data, or very little data depending on the user's input. I obviously don't want to to create storage for a lot of data if only a little is needed. So I heard about initialization and it sounds like exactly what I want; I just can't get it to work. Here is an example of one of my attempts:

@synthesize name;

...

- (NSString *)name {
    if (!name) name = [[NSString alloc] init];
    return name;
}

and then somewhere else

myObject.name = localName;

If I alloc and init myObject's name in its initializer then this works fine. However, when I try the above lazy initialization, the object's name becomes nil after trying to set it. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

@property (strong) NSString *name;

@synthesize name = _name;

- (NSString *)name {
    if (!_name) {
        _name = [[NSString alloc] init];
        ...
    }
    return _name;
}