Tracking the active time on the document

Question

Hi All,
I am trying to calculate the total active time spent on a document and for the same i tired using IIdleTaskMgr::kMouseTracking and IIdleTaskMgr::kUserActive flags in the runTask,but it is not working.Can somebody tell me if it is the right approach or not????

Answer 1

IdleTask won't be of much help. In fact it's probably going to give you the opposite result.
IdleTasks are only given time when things are quiet for InDesign - as a rough rule of thumb.
That is an IdleTask only really gets some time to work if nothing else is going on.
That's why it's named as it is: IdleTask is a way of taking moments when InDesign is idle to do other tasks.
You probably need to think what you mean by being actively worked on.
This will be a hard thing to measure meaningfully.
One approach would be to create an ActiveSelectionObserver.
This would track people clicking about on items that are on a page.
I'd then observe both SelectionChanged and AttributeChanged.
Then I'd bracket those events - would 5 seconds be a long time between actions?
What I'd do is every time something changed I'd reset my timer to 5 seconds.
While events happened within that time then work is being done.
Anything longer and the person is no longer working on it.
This method will probably underestimate the time.
A another measure would be to get the time when a document is opened
and substract that from the time the document is closed.
Pausing while the document is inactive might be also an idea.
This method will probably overestimate the time worked on a document.
There's probably a tonne of other ways of measuring time.
But as you can see, how you do it depends on what you are trying to measure.