How to create a breadcrumb trail

[dparkeruk]

Hi Captivaters,

I am trying to write some eLearning content that basically allows you to drill down into further detail at the end of each slide.

So, for example I will have one slide that introduces some concepts and does some animation, making images appear and then disappear over, say, a 3 minute period.  At the end of that slide, I present some buttons that allow you to jump to slides that offer more detail on specific subjects that were covered in the slide.

I have created the infrastructure to do this in Captivate and it works well .. except ...

I have created a 'Back' button on each of the 'child' slides to allow you to go back to the 'parent' - which would then allow you to drill down to some other child.

I am using an Advanced Action to store the Current Frame in a variable before jumping to the child slide so that the Back button on the child slide can use that variable to jump back to the end of the parent slide without having to go through the whole 3 minutes.  This is working.

Now I want to extend this because the childs themselves can provide links to more detail with them ending up as parents.

I basically need to create a breadcrumb trail and to add and remove the last frame from the list when I go forwards or backwards through the course.

I have hit a brick wall at the moment.

For my 'Back' button I need to do something like this:

LastFrame = [code to return last entry from BreadCrumbTrail]

BreadCrumbTrail = [code to remove the last entry from BreadCrumbTrail]

rdcmndGoroFrame := LastFrame

-- BreadCrumbTrail is currently just a comma separated list of Frame numbers that gets appended to every time I click a button that goes to a child - I couldn't find a way of creating an Array variable 8)

One specific question would be whether it is possible to use operators like 'Substring' in value clauses.  If that is possible, I could probably work it out myself.

Is there some command reference somewhere?  Is this ActionScript? (Sorry .. I am a complete newbie trying to run before I can walk

Thanks in advance for any assistance,

David

[jamesnotjim]

This is an ambitious idea, and it will probably take someone smarter than me to figure it out. I just wanted to add a few comments.

First, this sounds like a job for a widget. It would probably also require some user variables in the Cp project which the widget could read to learn your current depth in the hierarchy. A widget could read the title of the slide, so accessing that part would be easy. I don't know of an existing widget that would provide this sort of functionality. So you'd have to code it or find someone who can. Widgets are created in ActionScript and can access certain information from your Captivate project via Adobe's API or via Tristan's Widget Factory API.

It might be doable in Captivate using the Advanced Actions, as you've attempted. But I find that assisted-programming interface maddening and under-powered. It's not ActionScript. It's something Adobe cooked up just for Captivate.

[Julie88]

Hi David,

Have you had any luck with this?  I would like to do something similiar, but haven't found anyone who has been able to do it yet...

[dparkeruk]

Hi Julie,

I am afraid that I haven't been able to spend enough time on this.

In the meantime I have a workaround which is to set the property of a variable (e.g. LastLocationBefore{slideNumber|Name}) to the frame# (you could use slide#) of the slide that you access a given 'detail' slide from (meaning you need a variable for each detail slide).  Then, the detail slide has a back button which 'simply' goes back to the location referenced by its variable.

For example, in a very basic setup you could have 3 slides,

Master 1

  - Detail 1

    - Detail 1.2

You could have 2 variables, LastLocationBeforeDetail1 and LastLocationBeforeDetail1.2

If you navigated from Master 1 to Detail 1.2, LastLocationBeforeDetail1.2 would be the slide# or frame# of Master 1.

If you navigated from Detail 1. to Detail 1.2, LastLocationBeforeDetail1.2 would be the slide# or frame# of Detail 1.

In my 'solution' I have an variable and an advanced action for each 'detail' slide, the variable stores the last location and the advanced action basically goes back to the last location.

It is a bit of a fudge but seems to work until I find something better.

Cheers,

David

[Julie88]

Hi David,

Thanks for sharing your solution with me.  At this point, all I have done is be able to "show" the current path at the top of the slide.  But the user can't click on it to take them to a specific location within the path (like a normal breadcrumb).  Not sure what I am going to do about it.

Maybe Version 5? 

I used variables similar to what you did, but maybe I could link that up with a back button like you did.

If I come up with anything better I will share it!

Thanks!

Julie

[kevin_stagg]

Couldn't one just put in an individual hotspot over the text as a link? Yeah, a pain in the backside as they'd all have to be handcoded and you can't do that in Master Slides, but the end results should work.

[Captiv8r]

Hi Kevin

You, ummm, DO realize that the post you replied to is over a year old, no?

Cheers... Rick

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[Julie88]

Hi Kevin,

That is an idea, but a very manual process - I might still use it though..... Thanks!