Recording A Users Interaction With Interface - ios

Question

I have a lot of UIButtons in my app. I need to record which ones the user pushed, exactly the time elapsed between each button press, and then relay the information back to the user. Now, I've tried figuring out the logic to do this for quite some time. This is what I've tried first:
I start by firing an NSTimer. Every time the user presses a button, I store the time he pushed the button in arrayOne, and store the button he pushed in arrayTwo.
I have a "Playback" button. The goal of this playback button is to loop through both arrays, programatically pushing the buttons the user pressed at the elapsed time in which they pressed them.
I can probably achieve my goal this way, but this is just messy code and I don't like the design of it at all. What I'm looking for is an easier path. Is there an API that will record and playback the interaction?
I've found various links such as:
Audio Recording and Playback
That achieve similar to what I'm trying to do, but the sounds I'm loading into the app that play when each button is tapped are not recorded via microphone. They are included in the bundle.

Answer 1

What I did for the solution was make every button have a unique tag and call the same method "onAppButtonPressed" using tags to execute specific code for each button. Before anything though I created a fake button execution so I could mark when the app was opened. After executing button specific code when a UIButton was pressed, I stored information in an array with the button's tag and the button's fire date. When I call the startPlayback method, a for loop loops through all of the button data and schedules each button with the correct timing since the view loaded. I made a simple storyboard with three test buttons and a start playback button.
View Controller:
#import "PlaybackButtonEventViewController.h"
#import "ButtonPlaybackData.h"
#interface PlaybackButtonEventViewController ()
#end
#implementation PlaybackButtonEventViewController
{
NSMutableArray *playbackInformationArray;
BOOL playbackMode;
}
#define kInitialPlaybackData -1
#define kButtonOneId 1
#define kButtonTwoId 2
#define kButtonThreeId 3
#define kPlaybackButtonId 4
- (void) viewDidLoad
{
[super viewDidLoad];
self->playbackInformationArray = [NSMutableArray array];
self->playbackMode = false;
ButtonPlaybackData *initialPlaybackData = [[ButtonPlaybackData alloc] init];
initialPlaybackData.buttonTag = kInitialPlaybackData;
initialPlaybackData.buttonFireDate = (NSDate*) [NSDate date];
[self->playbackInformationArray addObject:initialPlaybackData];
}
- (void) startPlaybackMode
{
self->playbackMode = true;
for (int playbackIndex = 0; playbackIndex < self->playbackInformationArray.count; playbackIndex++)
{
ButtonPlaybackData *currentPlaybackData = [self->playbackInformationArray objectAtIndex:playbackIndex];
if (currentPlaybackData.buttonTag == kInitialPlaybackData)
continue;
ButtonPlaybackData *initialPlaybackData = [self->playbackInformationArray objectAtIndex:0];
long timeToWait = (currentPlaybackData.buttonFireDate.timeIntervalSince1970 - initialPlaybackData.buttonFireDate.timeIntervalSince1970);
dispatch_after(dispatch_time(DISPATCH_TIME_NOW, timeToWait * NSEC_PER_SEC), dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
[self onAppButtonPressed:[self.view viewWithTag:currentPlaybackData.buttonTag]];
if ((playbackIndex + 1) == self->playbackInformationArray.count)
{
self->playbackMode = false;
NSLog(#"Playback has ended!");
}
});
}
}
- (IBAction) onAppButtonPressed: (id) sender
{
if (![sender isKindOfClass:[UIButton class]])
return;
UIButton *button = (UIButton*) sender;
switch (button.tag)
{
case kButtonOneId:
NSLog(#"Button one pressed!");
break;
case kButtonTwoId:
NSLog(#"Button two pressed!");
break;
case kButtonThreeId:
NSLog(#"Button three pressed!");
break;
case kPlaybackButtonId:
[self startPlaybackMode];
break;
}
if (!playbackMode)
{
ButtonPlaybackData *buttonPlaybackData = [[ButtonPlaybackData alloc] init];
buttonPlaybackData.buttonTag = button.tag;
buttonPlaybackData.buttonFireDate = (NSDate*) [NSDate date];
[self->playbackInformationArray addObject:buttonPlaybackData];
}
}
#end
Now for the ButtonPlaybackData object, it has the following header file with an empty m file:
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#interface ButtonPlaybackData : NSObject
#property(nonatomic) NSInteger buttonTag;
#property(nonatomic, retain) NSDate *buttonFireDate;
#end
Hope this helps!