Question about cmi.suspend_data coding scheme

Question

I'm trying to determine whether the actual text entered in short answer quiz questions in Presenter 7 online presentations can be extracted.  We want to review the answers themselves, not just whether the student got the answer right.  In discussing this with my LMS vendor, they said that they would need to understand how the SCORM data, specifically the cmi.suspend_data, is structured to determine whether we could develop a means to report actual answers.  If I can put my hands on it, I need the coding scheme, including how data is delimited, and how the data is ordered.  Is this kind of information documented somewhere such that I could obtain it?

Answer 1

I’m doing something similar for a home-built LMS. That is, we want to capture and store what people say in free-form quiz fields. While the answer is embedded in the cmi.suspend_data info, it appears a better way to get it is from the cmi.interactions.*.learner_response info (assuming the module was published with the "report interactions" option, and your LMS asks for the data and does something with it).
For example, when the Presenter Flash module starts up, it calls our LMS with this method:
GetValue("cmi.interactions._children")
...and our LMS responds with the string:
id,type,learner_response,result
Later, on the slide that has the free-form quiz field, the Presenter module calls our LMS with this method:
SetValue("cmi.interactions.0.learner_response","this is the answer")
...where 0 represents it was the first quiz, and "this is the answer" was what I typed in the free-form field. Now, our LMS just has to do something with that value (write it to the database, etc.).
The one problem I’ve run into is when the user types double quotes or newlines in the free-form answer. When Presenter internally constructs the JavaScript to call SetValue of our LMS, it doesn’t seem to properly escape the quotes or newlines, and you end up with a JavaScript parse error in the browser (evident from Firebug) and the SetValue method is never called (so you lose the response). Maybe this is just a problem related to our custom-built LMS, but I suspect more that it is a bug in how the Presenter Flash module communicates between its Flash system and the JavaScript environment of the enclosing HTML page. (This is happening in the 7.0.5 version.)