Keeping track of objects on the screen - ios

Question

Even though I’m writing in Objective C, most of my code is still written in a procedural style. However, now I want to do something where that approach will not work. So I need some advice on how to deal with an indeterminate number of objects on the screen at the same time. I’m sure that this problem has been solved, I just haven’t been able to find out how.
I have a bunch of games where I put two or four pictures on the screen and then the user interacts with the picture. When they are done with a page they swipe to the next one and I use a transition to slide the pictures off the screen. I can control the movement of the pictures because when they were created I name them self.picture_1 and self.picture_2. The movement method knows about them even though that method didn’t create them.
Now suppose I want to have an indeterminate number of pictures on the screen. I can’t call them self.picture_1. through self.picture_n because ObjectiveC won’t let you dynamically create variable names. But I still need to move them in a method where they weren’t created.
I can make it work with two techniques, neither of which seem ideal. First, I look at all the objects on the screen and then do something with the ones that I want to target. Note: pictures are in buttons.
for ( id subview in self.parentView.subviews ) {
if ( [subview isKindOfClass:[UIButton class]] ) {
UIButton *pictureButton = subview;
for (NSUInteger i=0; i<self.totalItems; i++) {
NSUInteger row = (i % 2) + 1;
NSUInteger column = (i/2) + 1;
NSString *pictureTitle = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"pictureR%iC%i", row, column];
if ( [pictureButton.titleLabel.text isEqualToString:pictureTitle] ) [pictureButton removeFromSuperview];
}
}
}
This works for removing them from the view, but gets cumbersome when I try to make the pictures slide off the screen.
The second way is to make an array that holds the picture objects when they are created. I’ve been playing with something like this.
self.gridImages = [NSMutableArray arrayWithCapacity:4];
for (NSUInteger i = 0; i < itemsOnScreen; i++) {
Word *word = [wordListArray objectAtIndex:i];
self.gridImages[i] = word.image;
}
And then to do things with the pictures I loop through the array.
for (NSUInteger i = 0; i < itemsOnScreen; i++) {
Picture *picture = self.gridImages[i];
// do something with picture
}
Neither of these methods seems ‘right’ so I’m wondering if there is a preferred method for manipulating an indeterminate number of objects on the screen?

Answer 1

#Hot Licks, that works, so I put you answer into an answer.
I have it working for checkBoxes. They are created by the main view controller and it passes in a tag. I'm using tags starting at 1000 for checkboxes, 2000 for pictures, etc. Just before I put the checkBox on the screen, I assign it the tag.
[self.checkBox setTag:checkBoxTag];
You could also use: self.checkbox.tag = checkBoxTag;
When it is time to remove the checkBoxes, I loop through all of the tags starting at 1000 up to the total number of items on the screen. I have warnings turned up to 11 so I need to cast the counter to an NSInteger.
- (void)removeCheckboxes {
for (NSUInteger i = 0; i < self.totalItems; i++) {
NSInteger tagNumber = 1000 + (NSInteger)i;
[ [self.parentView viewWithTag:tagNumber] removeFromSuperview];
}
}