Button to Show invisible Text captions

[rhybeka32]

Hi All!

    I'm sure there is a simple answer to my question, but since I've been searching and trying things for a few days I thought I'd run up the white flag and ask for some help. I'm a new user to Captivate 5.5, and advanced options, but I think I've got a basic gist - just enough to get myself in trouble.  So what I'm trying to accomplish :

I have four text captions on one slide that I would like to have the user be able to make visible by clicking on a button. Most likely a transparent button laid over an image, but at the moment it doesn't matter what the button looks like, just that it works. I've set the button so that on success it assigns a 1 to a variable named v_click (lilybiri's blog ROCKS!) and it has 5 attempts so that on the last attempt it forwards to the next slide. I've written my first two advanced actions to check the variable v_click and depending on what number it is, show the corresponding text caption. When I preview the project, the button doesn't do anything and my captions stay invisible. I'm sure I'm missing a step somewhere but I just can't seem to get my thought process on the right track. Any thoughts or points in the right direction would be greatly appreciated!

Becky

[Captiv8r]

Hi Becky

Hopefully you and Lilybiri will forgive me for popping in here.

It appears you are simply assigning a variable for the button? I'm not seeing anything that is actually telling Captivate to run the Advanced Action.

Cheers... Rick

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[RodWard]

Rick is correct.

You're currently using the button click action to assign the value of the variable, but that won't automatically execute the Conditional Action you've created to Show the text caption. 

Unfortunately, you cannot currently use one Advanced Action to execute one or more OTHER Advanced Actions. So instead of using your button click action to just do the variable assignment, you'll need to redesign the way your interaction works so that the button click executes a Conditional Action with a number of clauses.  The first clause will be assigning the variable value, and then subsequent clauses will be used to check the current value of the same variable and show or hide captions.

Lilybiri's blog has many examples of similar interactions.

[rhybeka32]

Thanks Guys!

  I've worked through several of lilibiri's blog posts and answers on this forum to try to better understand how to work out my seemingly more simplistic situation (the current screenshots were from a soution given to Alexu84 back in 2010). I'll give it another go by writing my assign action into my additional actions and having the On Success action call it and see if that will work. Hopefully it's just as simple as that!

-Becky

[Lilybiri]

Becky,

Rod and Rick pointed in the correct direction. The event you will be using to trigger the advanced aciton is the Success event of the button. This means that all actions have to be in the script, in the correct sequence. It will be a conditional action with multiple decisions Your user var has a start value of 0, change this to 1 in the definition of the variable. The first decision will then be:

IF v_click =1

   THEN Show TC1

                Expression v_click = v_click + 1

The second decision, just change the ID of the textcaption and the value of v_click to 2, same for decisions 3, 4 & 5

But you have to hide the previous TC1 as well

The last decision will check if the var is greater then 5 and act accordinglty.

Cannot show example, typing on a tablet, no Captivate on it

and lot of typos

Lilybiri

PS thanks for comment on blog

@Rod Avoided having to add a first mimicked standard action by setting the value to 1 to start with

[rhybeka32]

Thanks Lilybiri!  No worries on the example, I think I'm close! I've got it to the point where the button click now shows all four of my text boxes at once instead of on each click, so I must still have something out of whack. The v_click var is set to 1, the button is set to run the AA script (called Show_TC), and the script appears to be following Lilybiri's logic. I don't actually need to hide the text captions once they're visible , thankfully.  It's progress though!  Since the button On Success is what's triggering the advanced action, is there anything the slide on enter action should be doing? Currently it's just set to continue. Thanks for the help everybody!

[Lilybiri]

Wait a minute, shouldn't have tried this on a tablet. Think you'll have to reverse the decisions, because indeed now if v_click = 1 you'll increment and you get also the second decision resulting in correct.

Reversing: start with the highest value (6 I presume) and end with the lowest (1) for the decisions. So sorry, this is cumbersome because there is no easy way to change the sequence of the decisions, something I have  been asking for since long.

Lilybiri

[rhybeka32]

Lillybiri,  I'm afraid to say you've lost me a bit.  Rebuilding the AA script isn't a problem, I just want to make sure I do it correctly .

Currently, I have four clicks : TC1 - TC4 that are coded like :

IF v_click =1

   THEN Show TC1

                Expression v_click = v_click + 1

and it sounds like I need to reverse the script and start with the highest value and move to the lowest value in the action/expression section so it would look like :

IF v_click =4  

     THEN Show TC1

                Expression v_click = v_click + 3

and so forth for TC2,TC3,TC4? I could just be completely misinterpreting your post so feel free to set me straight

[Lilybiri · Accepted solution]

I'm so sorry and again on tablet. You need to show 4 Text captions, each click has to show one in the sequence TC1, TC2, TC3, TC4. And to track the clicks we use the created user var v_click. Both actions are done in one decision. When all captions are visible and user clicks again, a button has to appear. But not sure ifthis last  action is apart or together with the appearance of the last TC4. Decisions are executed in sequence:

Decision 1

  IF v_click is greater than 4

     THEN Show BtNext

Decision 2

IF v_click is equal to 4

   THEN Show TC4   

Expression v_click = v_click +  1

Decision 3

IF v_click is equal to 3

[Lilybiri]

Very difficult to use this forum editor on tablet Here what should follow on previous post

THEN Show TC3

Expression v_click = v_click + 1

is this more clear?

[rhybeka32]

after working through it, yes ma'm, it makes sense - and it works   Thank you so much!

[Lilybiri]

Why is this question still marked Unanswered? Do you expect more?

[rhybeka32]

Oh! Sorry! I got sidetracked with work and forgot to come back in and mark it!