Can I use conditional and advanced actions on the same button?

[thismonkey]

I'm fairly new to Captivate, but come from a background of flash and am struggling to use Captivate to do some things I would have expected to be fairly simple and a normal requirement.

I want to create a screen with a number of interactive objects, in this case pictures, that the learner clicks on to display a piece of text.

On clicking the next picture the first piece of text is hidden and a second piece shown.

There are 6 pictures/buttons that need to work this way.

However I also want to assess whether all the buttons have been used, as we have to force the user to view the entire slide before they continue.

I can do the hide/show of text and buttons, and I've written a conditional action to check the variables for each button. However I don't know how/when to call this action.

I was hoping that in my advanced action for each button I could add in a call to the conditional 'check variables' action, which would nicely fulfil this requirement, however this doesn't seem to be the case.

I have also got animation/effects on the timeline before the images are on screen meaning I don't want to go back to the start of the timeline to use a 'on enter' event.

I'm surprised this isn't something more people need as although it may be frowned upon out in the e-learning field, disabled navigation is frankly not going away and working for any large corporation will be a must.

If anyone can shed some light on this, or maybe suggest a better approach then I would appreciate it.

Thanks.

[Lilybiri]

Have answered this question multiple times already, and explained in lot of webinars, presentations, but you cannot know that of course.

In this old article I explained how you can combine a standard with a conditional action: http://kb2.adobe.com/community/publishing/862/cpsid_86254.html

You need at least two decisions in one conditional action. Sequence is important. I suppose the user can click in any sequence, and multiple times on each image? In that case you need indeed one user variable per image, that will be a toggle, starts with a default value of 0 and be toggled to 1 on the first click on that object. The two decisions will be:

• 'Always' which is a mimicked standard action, only Then part, because the condition is always resulting in True:
  • IF 1 is equal to 1
      
    Assign v_one with 1
       Hide Grp_Txt
       Show Txt_one
• 'Checkit' will test all variables and show the Next button when all have been toggled to 1
  • IF v_one is equal to 1    AND
        v_two is equal to 1     AND

                    ......
               Show Bt_Next

            ELSE

               Continue

I grouped all the Text containers in one group Grp_Txt, because then you can duplicate the conditional action to create one for the second image and have only to change the variables in the first decision. I don't know which version you are using?
             

[thismonkey]

Hi Lilybiri,

Thank you for this, I suspected that this was going to be the way I would have to progress.

I have to ask though, at present the company I work for uses a very straight forward off the shelf WYSIWYG elearning content designer.

One of the core template pages is a hotspot page, which works in the way I have explained at the top.

This is also one of the standard e-learning pages I have used in all my other positions, including when building in Flash.

It seems incredible to me that to do such a simple, commonly used, page type we will require what is a fairly involved process rather than this being one of the page types or templates.

I am currently trying to pilot Captivate to show how much better it is to the current product, however the other designers have no programming background and I think will stuggle with the conditional actions, meaning that this is pretty much going to be a no go which I'm gutted about...

I think I stand a chance of teaching advanced actions but anything beyond that is unlikely initially.

RodWard, thanks for your comments, I'm finding the actions ok in Captivate, as I say above I'm just amazed that this simple and commonly used page is so convoluted to create!

My other frustration is the lack of control of the events, not being able to specify x and y for motions etc. but I'm finding work arounds...

Is there a way to create my own page template? Could I write all the actions and bundle that into a page to provide the other designers so with some naming conventions they could use this functionality?

Thanks for your help.

Matt

[Lilybiri · Accepted solution]

Of course that is possible. That was the approach I explained (for previous versions) :

http://blog.lilybiri.com/template-for-reusing-script

The templates I offered there have been asked for a lot of times, and are used all over the world, which is funny

I have also templates for CP6 and 7 but stopped offering everything for free. And in 7 you can have all shared actions in one library that is usable as external library... just a tip: http://blog.lilybiri.com/new-features-in-captivate-7-dot-01

Agree about the effects controls for motion paths, please introduce a feature request like many did already to have better control over the coordinate without having to edit the XML-file.

It would be nice to have timed events. Jim Leichliter has a widget (only for SWF) that allows some timed events. The Timer interaction can do that as well, but is not very accurate because after time has elapsed there is still a lag of about 2 seconds.

http://blog.lilybiri.com/events-and-advanced-actions    talks about the available events.

Sorry for all those links, but advanced actions are my passion since they appeared with 4. They are limited, agree, but I was able to persuade many users to give them a try at different levels. Would love to train more users for this 'point-and-click' approach that doesn't really need programming skills but only a logical mind.

[thismonkey]

Hi Lilybiri,

Again, thank you for your answer, this is, I think, as close as I am going to get, so I will mark it as correct.

I'm frustrated that this specific option isn't included or allowed for using more simple options, it almost looks like check boxes do this.

I appreciate that good e-learning design needs to allow great controls, but this seems like a simple option which I may struggle to convince others to use now.

For me, training non-programmers in using Captivate basically is realistically do-able. But training them to do something like this is far less likely... meaning that I'm probably not going to be able to win the argument that we should be using Captivate and unfortunately will be back making glorified powerpoint slides.

Thanks anyway.

M

[Lilybiri]

Why not offer them a template and good explanation how to use it? Like I did for that example template?

If they think that PPT is the ultimate tool for elearning, OMG, that is a presentation tool at the first place. And I do even use CP for presentations.

[RodWard]

You may just need a little help to make the transition from the old Flash way of doing things to the way Captivate does it with Advanced Actions.  They don't give you quite as much freedom and power as you might be accustomed to in AS3, but they're actually reasonably simple to get your head around once you understand the basics.

This book might be of assistance if you want some guidance:

http://www.infosemantics.com.au/adobe-captivate-advanced-actions