Newbie alert: Do I link to the htm or swf file?

[Guest]

Hi,

First time ever working with Captivate 4. Someone emailed me a zip file with an htm, swf and text file, which they instructed me to change the text file to a js file upon opening zip. I've uploaded the three files to the Web server and now I need to link to the presentation. I first linked to the htm file, but that didn't work so then I linked directly to the swf file and that seemed to work. Is that the typical way of linking to a Captivate file posted online? If so, what is the htm file for? Thanks for your help and pardon the newbie question. Guess I'll be learning more about Captivate now that I'm getting these sent to me.

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

The process should be this.

Copy all the files to the server where you will be accessing them.

Create the link to the HTM file.

What happens is the user clicks the link to the HTM file. It begins to load into the browser. It looks for he .JS file. If the .JS file cannot be found, things grind to a halt. If the .JS file is found, the process continues and loads the SWF the viewer sees.

The SWF can be linked to but what will happen is that it will scale to fit whatever the browser size is. That may cause distortion to occur and the presentation may look awful. The purpose of the HTML file is to advise the Browser that you wish to present the SWF at a specific size. Additionally, there may be a few browsers that won't know how to handle presenting a raw SWF. I think these are few and far between, but it's always better to err on the side of caution. I think in these cases the HTM will present while presenting the SWF would fail.

Cheers... Rick

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[Guest]

Thanks for the fast response. So, if my js file is in the same location as the htm and swf file, I'm trying to figure out why it's not working. The show is stopping, as you described...presumably because the htm file can't find the js file. Isn't the code below correct to link the js file to the htm file if they are both in the same folder?

<script src="standard.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

[Captiv8r]

Hello again

Did you ensure you copied the JS file to the server? Additionally, aside from changing the extension, did you change anything else?

I ask because web servers can be persnickety beasts. Especially if they are of the UNIX variety. Microsoft servers are more forgiving in this aspect but UNIX servers are rather particular about file names.

So if the HTML file is expecting standard.js and when you renamed from .TXT to .JS you named it standard.JS (note the use of upper case here) then things would fall apart because the server only knows there is a file named standard.JS and not standard.js.

Is that possibly what has happened? Do you have a URL you can share so we can see from this end? If so, maybe that would help.

Cheers... Rick

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[Guest]

I already made sure that everything stays lowercase, so I don't think that's the problem. The url location is below:

Centricity Practice Solutions, Basic Patient Visit Flow

Thanks again!

[Captiv8r]

Sorry, that link isn't working.

Cheers... Rick

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[Guest]

Oops! Sorry about that. Try this one.

http://www.centricityportal.com/overview_1_demo_final.htm

[Captiv8r]

Hello again

Thanks for the amended lnk. I can see that the standard.js is present. This bit is good news and we can rule out that possibility.

What is happening is that the page is trying to load a SWF that may have a different file name. The name of the SWF it is attempting to load is:

life of a visit overview_1_demo_final.swf

I tried linking to this and it failed. But if I remove the "life of a visit " part leaving behind only "overview_1_demo_final.swf" it seems to load fine.

So it would appear that you need to amend the HTML page and remove the "life of a visit " part.

Once you do this things should work.

Cheers... Rick

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[Guest]

That totally makes sense because the original file came to me with that naming convention. When I originally received the files, I shortened the name and took out the spaces to avoid any issues. Now, the problem I'm having is finding where in this html doc the name: life of a visit overview_1_demo_final.swf is showing up. Below is a copy of the html doc that I've been reviewing and I can't find any indication that the name includes "life of a visit." I've opened up my local html doc and also the one on the server and I can't find the offending words. Am I going blind? 

<!-- Copyright [2008] Adobe Systems Incorporated.  All rights reserved -->
<!-- saved from url=(0013)about:internet -->
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>Centricity Practice Solutions, Basic Patient Visit Flow</title>
<script src="standard.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>

<body   bgcolor="#F5F4F1">
<center>
     
<div id="CaptivateContent"> 
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var so = new SWFObject("overview_1_demo_final.swf", "Captivate", "752", "592", "8", "#CCCCCC");
  so.addParam("quality", "high");
  so.addParam("name", "Captivate");
  so.addParam("id", "Captivate");
  so.addParam("wmode", "window");
  so.addParam("bgcolor","#F5F4F1");
  so.addParam("menu", "false");
  so.addVariable("variable1", "value1");
  so.setAttribute("redirectUrl", "http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash");
  so.write("CaptivateContent");
</script>
    

<script type="text/javascript">
  document.getElementById('Captivate').focus();
  document.Captivate.focus();
</script>
</center>
</body>
</html>

[Captiv8r]

Weird

The way I determined that was by clicking your link then using the View Source option of the browser to see what the HTML said.

The window I see:

Click to view larger...

You might perform a double-check on the HTML file...

Cheers... Rick

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[Guest]

Well, I finally got it to work. Even though opening the file on the server showed that the naming convention was correct, I went ahead and deleted all the files on the server associated with this and reposted everything. Now, the presentation plays correctly. Thank you for helping me to troubleshoot this. Even though I don't know exactly why this occurred, I'll be sure to delete all the files on the server and repost if I have an issue like this again. I appreciate your fast responses today.

[jamesnotjim]

I don't know if this speaks to your specific issue, but it might be relevant to future users stumbling across this thread. In addition to Rick's troubleshooting, there are two additional things to keep in mind. (My examples here are for Cp4. Things may have changed in Cp5.)

Windows, by default, hides file name extensions for "known file type." This can be a problem when you're doing any sort of design or programming work, because what looks like "standard.js" in the Windows file system could actually be "standard.js.txt" or something else entirely. The cure for this in WinXP is to open a window (e.g. My Documents) and select Tools, Folder Options... to open the Folder Options dialog. You then click its View tab and remove the check from the box to the left of "Hide extensions for known file types." (If you know what you're doing, you also change the radio button under "Hidden files and folders" from "Do not show hidden files and folders" to "Show hidden files and folders.")

The second thing to keep in mind is that Unix and Linux web servers--including Apache, the most popular web server in the world--don't like spaces in file names. File names in Unix/Linux are also, as Rick pointed out, case sensitive. Since Captivate bases the project output file names on the project name, you can save yourself trouble by using underscores (or camelCase or PascalCase) in your project names (and, thus, your output file). You can override all of this in Cp's publish settings, but I find it easier to just use a good naming convention and stick to it:

Using Underscores:

Cp Project file: my_super_cool_demo.cp

Cp Output HTML file will be: my_super_cool_demo.htm

Cp SWF will be: my_super_cool_demo.swf

Cp JS file will always be: standard.js

Using Case:

Cp Project file (in camel case): mySuperCoolDemo.cp

Cp Project file (in Pascal case): MySuperCoolDemo.cp

You can even use hyphens, I believe, though I don't use them, so I haven't tested this:

Cp Project file (with hyphens): my-super-cool-demo.cp

You can always change the name of the HTM file after the fact without breaking anything. I usually put my files for each project in their own directory on a web server and rename the HTM file as index.html, since that's the default index file for most web servers (which lets you open that file by specifying the directory that contains it, rather than having to include the file name itself). But, if you manually change any of the other files, you'll have to find references to them in the HTM file and change those as well.