About dropbox and combobox widgets and variables

Question

This is a two-part problem.
First, I wanted to use a combo box (or drop box) widget to insert a field that can be populated by choosing one of six options (A through F). The variable that gets populated is called 'a'. On the slide, there is the drop (or combo) box and a button that executes an advanced action. In the advanced action, It goes:
IF variable 'a' is equal to 'A' go to slide x.
ELSE go to slide y.
No matter what option is chosen on the combo (or drop) box, nothing gets assigned into the variable. I tried this with both widgets. I finally ended up using a textbox and asking the user to type the correct option into the text box.
Which leads me to the secont part of the problem. The textbox is associated to the variable 'a'. The correct answer is 'A'. The advanced action is the same as above. However, if I want to make the correct answer lower-case 'a', the advanced action ALWAYS evaluates as false and executes the 'ELSE' action, even if the user enters lower-case 'a' into the field. Regardless of what is entered as the answer in this text field, I simply cannot get a correct answer. Meanwhile, if the advanced action is changed to accept the upper-case 'A' as the correct answer, it works.
What am I doing wrong here? What do I need to do to make use of the combo box (or drop-box) widgets in the first place? Anyone with more experience?

Answer 1

Thanks for the response. it's Captivate 5 (sorry for forgetting).
I went ahead and renamed my variables to something more meaningful. That didn't quite resolve the problem. I went ahead with further investigation. I put five comboboxes, each with six different values and each populating their own variables. To see what's actually being entered into those variables, I put a simple text box on the side and populated it with variable values. My advanced action looked at those variables and and executed one of the two specific actions, depending on what the variables contained ("IF [variables] EQUAL TO [a set of data], then do this; ELSE do that"). However, no matter what they contained, it continued to execute the 'Fail' action, rather than 'Correct'. After a while, I noticed in that textbox that showed variable content, that there was a small space before the text. The space did NOT appear if I chose the first option on the list. This led me to see if the combobox would work if I listed options without any spaces. My original entry was: First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth. I changed the entry to: First,Second,Third,Fourth,Fifth. This finally solved my problem!
It seems that the widgets that come with Captivate don't behave consistently. Checkbox widget works properly when options are entered with spaces after commas. Combobox doesn't seem to. I haven't tested dropbox yet (I'm in a rush to deliver), but my guess is it won't allow spaces either.
One way to resolve this would have probably been to modify the action to say: IF [variable] CONTAINS [literal]..., instead of: IF [variable] IS EQUAL TO [literal]...
So, this problem has now been resolved. However, I now have a weird problem that I can't figure out, and it looks like a Captivate 5 bug. I have some 15 advanced actions. For some reason, I can no longer select one of them (no. 7 or so). All others I can select and edit, but this particular one I can't recall at all. The action no longer works correctly, so I re-created it, called it something else, and am now calling this new one. The original one can't be edited or deleted, and I'm just a bit concerned what's happened with that script.
Has anyone encountered this situation before?