Navigation Confirmation Headache

Question

Hi,
I've been working on a CBT for a few days now and I'm finding
Captivate 2 very intuitive and pretty easy to use, all apart from
one aspect - complex navigation.
Until now, I've had a fairly linear solution, whereby I have
an entry screen, followed by a title/menu screen from which the
user can select which part of the training program they wish to
view.
Each part is then a series of slides, and at the end it goes
back to the menu. Easy
However, now I wish to add a button at the bottom of each
slide to allow the user to return to the main title/menu screen at
any time during their training (say if they picked the wrong item
on the menu, for example), but I also want to include a
confirmation so the user doesn't inadvertantly click the button and
is whisked away from their training.
I've tried making a single slide with "are you sure?" and
YES, NO buttons. The Yes button is easy - Jump to Slide: Title.
However, when I came to the NO button, I was stumped. "Previous
Slide" will take me to the previous slide in the whole line of
slides, rather than the previous slide the user was on, so if I
wanted to do it this way, I'd need a confirmation slide after EVERY
SLIDE so that the previous slide would be the slide it came from...
This is infeasable due to space and production time, so I
tried using Javascript - but how can I do this? No-where in the
help or online can I find a similar problem, and as far as I know
there's no help available on the use of javascript in Captivate 2,
in the manual it just says "select this option to run a specific
piece of JavaScript code." So what would the commands be for "go to
the slide you were last on" or even "bring up a window.confirm()
and if yes go to title, else stay put"? I've been trying for a
while, and I was wondering if someone out there would be able to
help..
My main concern is that no-one else seems to have had this
problem, which says to me I'm just being silly and I've missed
something obvious... If this is the case, please let me know!!
Sorry it's so long, but at least this way I (hopefully) won't
have to explain myself any further!
I look forward to hearing your replies, thank you
Oli

Answer 1

Thank you Rick, you've been an immense help. I tried
everything you said and none of it worked even in the slightest - I
was extremely upset, angry, disappointed, depressed, impassive,
confused and finally down right hungry (in that order).
So I went to have some lunch, then got back and worked on
something else for a bit.
Finally, I summoned up the courage to give it another look. I
re-read what you'd said, I started again, FROM SCRATCH with a blank
document; nothing but a big, frikkin massive button on it (you can
see this here:
www.scree.co.uk/annoyingCaptivateWork/test.htm).
I even got rid of the window.close() and just put a damn javascript
alert in there - how more basic can you get?
Fingers crossed, I would've been praying to some God or other
if I was of the religious type. Perhaps, in a way, I was praying to
the God of
Insanely-Uncomplicated-But-Annoyingly-Unfathomably-Incorrect code.
Either way, I couldn't believe it when it still didn't work!!
"What's going on?" You may be asking yourself. "I thought he
was thanking me... Or perhaps that was that damn Sarcasm I've heard
of - it'll never catch on you know".
So I will put your mind at rest this minute and say you WERE
right, Rick. As right as you possibly could be. It was my own lack
of sense, or possibly my own blind belief that "surely anything
that'll run on a website will run off my desktop.. right?" which
got me in to this trouble and confusion.
I was preparing to write back and say I'd tried everything
you suggested and still couldn't make it work. I had prepared (in
my head) a small step by step portrait of how my day had gone from
bad (I had to get out of bed) to slightly worse (no milk) to even
worse (my train was delayed) to bloody aweful (damn Captivate),
with annotations and small diagrams and numbered flow charts of
what I'd done and how I thought I couldn't possibly have failed to
come across the right answer by now through SHEER CHANCE if not
through reason.
I had just got to the point where I was uploading the
test.htm file to a website so I could link it to you to show you
that I had indeed followed the teachings of Rick the Captiv8r when
suddenly.. inexplicably.. IT WORKED!!! IT BLOODY WORKED!!
All along I'd been running the thing from the folder it had
been published too, to no avail. All I had to do was copy it into
my local web root directory and run it online and all my problems
would've been solved half a day ago.
Thank you so very much for all your help. If you don't mind
too much I'll continue to use your example from earlier to help me
get started on pausing and switching slides etc.
To sum up, for those of you who really can't be bothered to
read everything up there: Javascript buttons in flash files made by
Captivate seem to only work when accessed through a webserver, not
through the file system.
If anyone can think of any reason why this would be the case,
I would love to know. Thank you again - I'd better get on with the
CBT now
Oli