Can advanced actions be applied to animations, images etc??

When messing around with Cap 4 last week, I was sure I saw a
function that would make it possible to apply an advanced action to
an image or animation. Now I simply can't find it and I am
questioning whether I saw it in the first place and that it was
possibly a dream of what I wanted Cap 4 to have.
Can anyone help me?????
Regards,
Ryan

Hi Ryan,
You can show / hide objects using the Show and Hide actions
that are part of the Standard Actions. Choose Project >
Actions.... When the Action Dialog appears click on the Advanced
Actions tab. Next, from the Edit / Create Actions menu choose
Create a new action... Now double-click on Add Statement, from the
menu that now appears, choose either Show or Hide and then select
the object you want to show or hide.
Once you have created and saved your Action. You could then
apply this to say a button.To do this you would simply create a new
button and from the on success Action menu of the button dialog,
you would select Execute advanced action and then select the action
you just created.
If you wanted to hide multiple objects. You could choose
Multiple Actions (from the on success) menu. Clicking the "..."
button will display the Set Advanced Actions dialog. Selecting say
Hide would then display all the objects on the current slide. From
this dialog you can then select each of the objects you want to
hide and then click the Add button. Clicking OK twice to dismiss
both the dialogs and then previewing the project will then enable
you to test out the hide functionality.
Actions are a fantastic addition to Adobe Captivate 4 and
although they might take a little getting used are definitely worth
preserving with.
Best - Mark

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Can Advanced Action functions be done with JS?

Is it possible to use JavaScript to perform Advanced Action functions like "show", "hide", "assign", etc? If so, is there an applicable reference doc?
Thanks,
Bob

The SWF JS API does not support show/hide... only assign. HTML5 JS API supports show/hide and assign.
To assign a vairable regardless of Output, you can look at this article:
http://captivatedev.com/2012/12/17/display-the-students-name-from-your-lms-using-adobe-cap tivate-6-x/
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cp.hide("ItemNameHere");
cp.show("ItemNameHere");

Advanced Action not applied if button is clicked 1time

I am making a game in Cap 5 that has a timer. We were given feedback that sometimes the timer stresses people out - so I added a Hide and a Show button on each slide. Clicking a button executes an advanced action that corrsponds w/the button name - but both buttons still appear the whole time. Example: The learner clicks Hide, the timer goes away, learner is kept on the same slide but they don't see the timer (all expected). Button for Hide is still there and does nothing if clicked. Learner clicks Show button and the timer is shown (expected), but the timer is reset (not expected). Lesson stays on that slide (expected). Learner re-clicks hide and the timer is hidden (expected). Learner re-clicks Show and the slide advances (not expected) and timer is reset (not expected).
The timer is a widget that we created and is set to appear for the rest of the slide. It worked well before this show/hide stuff was added. Any ideas?
Bonus round: There is audio on this same slide - and it will not play when the slide advances from previous slide...though it will play if you click forward and then back to this slide. Any ideas there?
I'm happy to attach images - if you think this will help. Let me know what you need.
Thank you!

Most widgets execute their code when they enter "Runtime" on the Captivate stage. Essentially this can be translated as when the widget is shown on the stage then it will execute its code.
If you hide a widget and then show it again then the widgets code will execute once more as it figures it is entering "runtime" for the first time.
The best option is to add the "show/hide" buttons directly in the widget as you can keep the widget visible on the stage, but simply hide the timer movieclip. This would make sure that the timer is not reset.
www.cpguru.com - Adobe Captivate Widgets, Tutorials, Tips and Tricks and much more..

Can Resource Actions be applied to the "Lighthouse" resource?

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I am thinking of how to get Powershell scripts called in a workflow...
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Hi Raman,
There can be only one redirect server with one webhost redirection and hence there cannot be two redirect URL's. I don't think this can be achieved. Best idea would be for the server to issue redirects.
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Can an advanced action open an image in a seperate window?

I am wondering if this is possible.
I am using an advanced action to Show/Hide an image. I would like the image to open in its own window so the user can move it to compare the pop-up image with the other image and instructions on my slide. (I have a TOC so I have limited space on the slide.) I think the advanced action might be Execute JavaScript because that choice gives me the option to open in new window. I am not savvy with writing JavaScript so any help would be great.
Thanks
Jeff

Hi Jeff,
Welcome to Adobe Forums.
In order to open an image in its own window you can go to Properties > Action > On Success > Open URL or File, in the URL box type the name of the image and from the drop down select New.
After publishing the project, copy and paste the image in the output folder and then you can view the output, this will open the image on a new window.
I hope it helps.
Thanks
Vikas

Why won't the Continue option work in my advanced action?

I'm in Captivate 7. I have a slide where the user clicks on a click box which executes an advanced action: to show an animation, then play an audio file (a beep) and then it should continue (go to the next slide). But it won't. The slide is set to be 4 seconds long, but pauses until the user clicks on the click box. The advanced action reads this way: Show Laserline; Play Beep; Continue.
In the preview mode, if I wait more than 4 seconds, when I click it just goes to the next slide without executing the action. If I click within the 4 seconds, it will play the advanced action but it won't advance to the next slide (unless I click on the clickbox again). I've tried changing the continue to Go To the Next Slide, but then it won't Show or Play. What am I missing?

I think you may be approaching this the wrong way.
If I understand you correctly, you were expecting that the series of actions you added into your Standard Action would be executed to allow the animation to complete first, THEN play the sound, THEN continue to the next slide. However, you don't mention how long your animation runs for. The standard action will indeed execute all actions one after the other, but they will likely be executed within milliseconds of each other. So this could mean that your animation may or may not have time to complete.
As proof, you yourself said that changing your Continue action to a Jump to Next Slide means that everything happens so quickly that it appears as if your action only jumps to the next slide and that's all.
If what you want is that clicking the object causes the animation to play AND complete playing, THEN a beep to occur, THEN progress to the next slide, all you need to do is lay these things out on the timeline. Place your animation to appear on the timeline and begin playing immediately after the pause point of the Click Box (i.e. the pause point is right at the end of the click box object's timeline). Then place another object on the timeline that will NOT be visible and add the beep to it as object audio. (Use a highlight box set to 100% transparency.) This should be right before the end of the slide timeline. After the beep has played, the slide should automatically continue to the next slide.

Is it possible for saving animated image

hi,
I want to save a animated image in my project.Can anyone tell me which image format can i use to save the animated image.
thanx a lot

An animated GIF image, when converted to PDF, will not animate. You can implement animation effects using JavaScript, but it requires programming and is moderately complicated. You can also include an animation using Flash (RMA annotation), but you'd have to convert the animated GIF to Flash first.

How can I use an advanced action to show a sequence of images by clicking on a single button?

I'm trying to make Captivate 7 project where I have several slides where images are revealed one after the other. I wanted to insert a button along the lines of click here for next image but can't work out how to write the script for it. The Adobe information is next to useless and I can't find anything which breaks down these processes from scratch. Any help appreciated!

You're a little early but help is on the way. There are a couple of new e-books being written about using Advanced Actions.
One of them is currently available as a discounted pre-release here:
http://www.infosemantics.com.au/e-books/guide-to-adobe-captivate-advanced-actions-01
Lilybiri is also writing an Advanced Actions Cookbook as well.
Your specific use case could be handled a number of different ways:
Have your images on different slides and use an identical button to jump to each slide.
Use Conditional Advanced Actions and User Variables to check which images have been viewed and then show the next image in a series. This would allow everything to be done on the same slide but is a more advanced technique that may be beyond your abilities until you are more versed with how variables and advanced actions work.

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

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.

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

Show image with advanced action

I want to show an image using using an advanced action from a question slide
I have inserted the image on the master slide because its a tick. And the question slides are in a pool.
Is there anyway to show this image? When I click show in advanced actions I get a list of images but none have the names assigned. They show img1, img2, img3 etc
thanks for looking and help
EDIT- I think my main problem is that none of the images have the names that they were assigned. Why?

In order to use Advanced Actions to show or hide objects such as images you need to be able to reference the Item Name of the object. Objects on Master Slides do not have Item Names, so you cannot show or hide them that way. You need to place the objects on the slides themselves, give them a unique Item Name that helps you to find them in lists (e.g. change from img2 to img_Fred), set their Visible in Output to OFF, and then you can potentially use Advanced Actions to SHOW the images.
However, your next issue will be that on Question Slides you only have a few events you can use to trigger Advanced Actions. You can trigger an action via the On Slide Enter event of the slide, but that only applies BEFORE the user has answered the question correctly or incorrectly. The On Success and On Last Attempt events are the other events you can use and these fire AFTER the user has answered the question, but only AFTER the learner has clicked for the second time to quit the Feedback Captions on that slide.

CS5 - Applying Actions to Select Part of Image

Hello,
I'm working in CS5. I'm new to actions and I would like to apply the action only to a specific part of the image. For example, for a portrait, I would like the action to apply to the background of the image, not necessary on the individuals face.
I'm not aware if there is a way to apply it to the entire image, then erase it from the areas I don't want it to apply, or if I lasso an area and apply it. I've tried it several different ways to no avail.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions,
Liv

I would like the action to apply to the background of the image, not necessary on the individuals face.
As the differentiation of fore- and background of an image can be a convoluted issue (have you ever tried to clip the image of a curly-haired person from a background of shrubbery?), it does not lend itself to automation easily.
I'm not aware if there is a way to apply it to the entire image, then erase it from the areas I don't want it to apply
If you work with Adjustment Layers or Layer Masks in general the Masks can subsequently be edited easily.

Click box - advanced actions - dims images

If I have a text box, by using advanced action on slide I hide it, then on a click box I want it to show - when the hidden text box reveals itself, the image dims. Why is that? What do I have set incorrectly?
thank you to anyone who can help!

Hello again
Indeed I thought I had explained that.
Each object such as an Image, Caption or whatever is generally equipped with a Fade In and Fade Out transition effect. These effects are typically half a second long. So if you pause the slide very near the end of the object display time, the pause is occurring as the transition is fading the object out of view. Thus the "dimming" occurs.
If you configure the object so no fade out occurs on the transition (Fade In only) then it doesn't matter if you pause near the end because it doesn't fade out of view. Likewise, if you adjust the timing so the Click Box pauses the slide before the transition begins to occur, the dimming won't happen either.
Cheers... Rick
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How can you trigger more than 1 advanced action?

I wonder if someone can answer a very quick question for me that I'm struggling with at the moment
I have 6 stacks of 16 images. I have the user select the name of the image they want to show in each stack, and then I have an advanced action that runs to show only the image they have selected. Currently I have 6 actions, one for each stack of images.
What I need to do is to run all 6 advanced actions as the user enters a page so they only see the 6 images they have selected on the previous slide. My problem is that I can only seem to run one advanced action upon slide entry (or from a button or anything else). Is there a way to combine advanced actions, or to run more than one action from a single command? Or does this require a different approach?
Thanks in advance for your help.
James

Thanks Lilybiri and RonWard,
I guess I could have been clearer in my question.
I'm using Cp5 and to give you an idea of what I'm doing I've pasted an image of the slide I'm playing with below.
Each image you see here is actually a stack of 16 images that are hidden on slide enter. There is a combo box under each stack that allows the user to choose the name of the image they want to use, and the button triggers an advanced action that shows the image that has been selected.
Ultimately what I intend to do is to move the combo boxes to the previous slide, and on slide enter only the 6 six selected images will be shown. I'm then going to use a drag and drop widget to create a question about of all of this. The teacher will select which 6 images are relevant to their students, enter some information (definitions, quotes etc) that are related to each image, and the students will have to drag them to the correct image / icon.
So... I've created 6 advanced actions, one for each stack of images. (I suspect that was my mistake).
I've attached an image of the action. For each Action there are 16 parts to it. One for each image. You can see here that the action is fairly simple. It just checks the variable that comes form the combo box, and if it has been selected, then it shows the appropriate image. If not it just moves onto the next part of the action which checks for the next image being selected.
There is one action for each stack of images - so 6 actions. If there was a way to combine them it would be very helpful - but I'm suspecting that's not possible. Alternatively if there was a way to trigger all of them together that would work - but again I don't think that's possible. So what are my options.
Finally, and here's the biggy that I don't think can be done. As I eluded to above. The idea here is that a teacher will set this up and a student will then complete the activity. Is there anyway for the teacher, without Captivate, to select these images and enter some other variables, and have that information propagated across a network so many students can use the project with the variables the teacher enters just once?
Thanks heaps for your help. This forum is great. I'll spend some time reading the blogs mentioned also. I'm so thrilled that Captivate is finally letting me do some of the elearning things I've wanted to do for years. I'm a teacher by training and now consulting and building resources for schools.
Thanks again
James

Can't go to next slide after adding advanced action to answer and other

Hi,
I'm creating a quizz and there are some problems I can't
solve.
I have a flash project with login page, where user should
fill name, company and e-mail. To this e-mail I have to send the
results of the quizz. After you correctly fill the gaps and click
OK, my flash aplication starts within the Adobe Captive 4 project
(swf file). And now problems:
1. In my captivate project: I have a question, 3 answers, 3
possible attemps and one correct answer. If user answer wrong,
there is a grey hightlight box, which should apears over my chosen
wrong answer and stay there to mark already chosen answer and there
is also a text animation "Sorry, your answer is not correct." under
the quizz (on the same slide), which appears instead of error
message. No problem, it works, I made a script for it, which is
joined to every wrong answer (in Edit Question > (Answers)
Advanced > Execute Advanced Action). But the problem is with
correct answer (it shows text animation "Congratulations!" and
green hightlight box). If I specify the event on correct answer and
then submit the right answer, it shows the hightlight box, the text
animation, but it doesn't continue to next slide! It stucks despite
of the
settings Edit Question > Options > (If correct answer)
Action: Go to next slide). If I add new statement to my
script, which is "Go to next slide" and then click on the right
answer, it immediately jump to next page and doesn't show the
hightlight box and the text animation. How can I wait until the
duration of the animation ends and after that go to next slide?
Script for the advanced action on my correct answer is:
-> show rightHighlightBox
-> show congratulationsText
2. I need another pass fail option, for example - I have 30
questions - 3 answers, one correct, 3 attemps. User submits wrong
answer, but then he choose the right one, but he choose the wrong
one at first ---> 0 points. It's e-learning and I need to allow
users to correct them.
3. How can I export the value of correctAnswers to my flash?
Is it possible?
Thank you very much for reply!

Hi,
You need to add a "Continue" statement at the end of your
script otherwise you will have to click on Skip to go to next
slide.
And all the Quzzing information can be accessed from Flash
using the Quizn variables.
thanks
ravi

Can I call a specific time of the timeline in an advanced action?

Can I use the specific time of the time line to trigger an advance action? If I can what is the correct syntax to call the timeline information?
eg:
in a conditional advanced action
IF
Timeline - is equal to or greater than - 00:16
AND
Timeline - is less than or equal to - 00:20
ACTION
Show - Image 21
ELSE
Hide Image 21

Double post, see: Can you add Advanced actions to an image?
My list with system variables will not really help, I'm afraid. My suspicion (and yours in the other thread) is that the OP doesn't understand the design of the Timeline.

Can advanced actions be applied to animations, images etc??

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