Widgets buttons no advanced actions

help me...
I've started a project for this company and they are using cp5 for theri e-learning tool, its my first time using it, although i have made other e-learning packs with CP2/3
i wanted to use the fancy new widgets and have swf buttons on my menu page but I'm having problems with them not actioning and pausing the slide. I tired everything but they don't seem to jump to the correct slide, or pause the slide.
There is no advanced action option in the widget so I can't command them that way and when I hit the back button the the hold movie play with no pauses at all...
what wrong with it any ideas.
JSP

Hi,
I think i need to understand how button widgets pause a slide before it continues, I have a next button on my slide and its a flash version from the widgets panel. just a standard button on from captivate 5 library, but when i go into the options to say on click go to slide whatever it doesn't pause the slide and there is no way to adjust the pause on the button. On a normal button you can just add advanced option to progress when the delegate click or to hold until they do so. but here we have no such options
so all I need to understand is click button to move forward - not automaticly- and when i go back click button to move forward again not play all slide until then on
jas.

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The check, conditional action is triggered on entering which slide? If it is the same slide as where the buttons with the standard actions sit, this condition will never result in True.
I just answered a similar question in this thread:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/4454104#4454104
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I'm having an issue getting a button to display after the learner places his mouse over three different rollover slidelets which are all on the same slide. I created three variables and assigned each to the rollover slidelets. I also created a conditional action that I assigned to the slide. The variables are set to zero and then the action is to assign the variable with 1 after it's rolled over. The conditional action says that once all three variables are equal to 1, show the button and continue. Unfortunately the button is not displaying after the three rollovers have been viewed. Any insight?

I can only suspect what is going wrong, it would have been a lot easier if you did show those actions.
My suspicion is due to this sentence '... a conditional action that I assigned to the slide'? There are two slide events: On Enter, and On Exit. Read more about those events:
http://blog.lilybiri.com/events-and-advanced-actions
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http://blog.lilybiri.com/blog-after-posterous-clickclick
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We have a few very complicated projects using lots of advanced actions and widgets that simulate laboratories.
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Hi Renovator
I'll take on the last thing you asked about. Differences in terms of reliability.
Unfortunately the answer to that one is actually a question.
The question? How long is a piece of string?
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It is up to you, but personally I would not use question slides for this kind of 'questions'. Reason is that you have lot of branching to do, and need a lot of control. This is not a normal quiz. You do not need scoring, do you need to report something?
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Have a look at:
Question Question Slides in Captivate - Captivate blog
Question Question Slides - Part 2 - Captivate blog
Indeed, Submit button is part of the Question slide, not a normal button. You can add a custom shape button, but it will never replace what happens when the Submit button is clicked: validation of the answer, showing captions, adding to score etc. Making the score depending on the attempt is not possible with default functionality, it is possible with custom question slides, but then the reporting to LMS is another issue. You should try to do it by JS, or if you only need SWF-output you could use the Master widget by InfoSemantics.
Link score to attempts in Custom questions - Captivate blog
Lilybiri

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The slide would work like this:
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When they click the button, the advanced action would start the video, and the associated text boxes appear as each "step" in the video goes by. It's a procedure with step by step instructions.

You are very correct. I am making it too complicated! I believe I will do exactly what you said. If I still want to have a button that says Play Video, I could just have that button advance to the next slide. The learner will probably not even know they are on a different slide. Thanks for making me see that clearly. Sometimes I get too caught up in trying to do something one way. Thanks for the help!

Immediate Freelance Work Creating Advanced Actions

We need help wrapping up a few Captivate modules. Pages are already laid out. You just need to create the advanced actions to make the pages interactive. Need to complete over the next few of days, if interested please reply here or send me a private message.
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Thank you, Lilybiri. I'll take a look.
I'll go ahead and quickly describe the hot spot issue. Hopefully you'll have a moment to reply.
The quiz concerns language training. I want to have participants find errors in a passage. For example,
Paul will *control the figure and *eventual errors will be reported to you
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I want to provide a user with a set of dropdowns containing text strings, and if they select the right combination of dropdown entries, give them a Continue button, and if they don't select the right combination then give them an error message and solution.
The trouble I'm having is I don't understand how to get the action to read the widget selections. I'll go through a demo to show you what I'm doing so far.
(Context: CP5, and JavaScript/programming ignoramus.)
Objects in the demo
My steps so far
1. Set up two user variables
2. Create two dropdown widgets (Widget1 and Widget2) each with labels "Right" and "Wrong" and point them to the two variables.
3. Add a Continue button and a text box labelled Wrong, each set to invisible.
4. Add a Submit button with advanced interactions to show Continue or Wrong depending on what is chosen in the widgets.
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IF vTestWidget1 is equal to Right
AND vTestWidget2 is equal to Right
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The problem
I run this and only ever get the ELSE response (i.e. I can select two Rights and the Submit button still displays the Wrong text box).
Possibilities
I'm missing some sort of formatting around the text?
I need something like a submit button for each widget to prompt an update in their associated variables?
Can anyone help?

Thanks, for the help guys. However...
I have triple-checked my variable naming and can't see any problem.
What I did do was eliminate the "Choose" option from the head of each widget. The demo suddenly worked perfectly!
BUT that perfect outcome seems accidental.
The demo seems to work ONLY when the Advanced Action's success conditions refer to the first entry on each dropdown. That is, if the dropdowns contain values Right and Wrong, IN THAT ORDER, and the Action looks for "Right" and "Right" then you can click Submit and it produces the Continue button.
However, for example, if you reverse the order of the entries in one widget, so Widget2 contains Wrong and Right, and YOU DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING ELSE, then selecting "Right" and "Right" and clicking the Submit button produces the Wrong text box response.
So the order in which entries are listed in the widget has an impact, at least for me.
When you guys replicated my use case, did you replicate the Choose entries in the widgets, or did you simply have two top-level Right responses?
I've uploaded my first demo, without any other changes, to Google Docs, if you want to check it:
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0Bz2ZZ5mfN3BkMjc1N2U3ZjgtZWZmMC00MmVlLWE3Y2UtZTczMzM5ZjI1N GMx&sort=name&layout=list&num=50

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I am using Adobe Captivate 5 and this seems like such a simple thing but I can't figure it out:
On the second to last slide of my project I have a certificate slide with a print widget button that prints the current slide. I want to be able to jump to the final slide after the user prints. The item name of the print widget is Widget_3. Is there a way for me to say onclick of Widget_3 jump to next slide? I don't see an easy way to attach an action to this widget.
There's also the issue of the print dialog. It would be even better if the project jumped to the final slide when the user clicked OK in the print dialog rather than the jump occurring right when the print dialog pops up.
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I'm not sure if you can use Advanced Actions for this purpose to be honest but I'm sure that Lilybiri will be pop in here and answer that for you.
If you have access and knowledge about Adobe Flash you could modify the Certificate widget. The source files are available and you could add some code that will make the widget send your project to the relevant slide once the printing is finished. You are able to "listen" after the print job status so you could make it execute a function when the print job is succesful (e.g. printed).
/Michael
Visit my Captivate blog with tips & tricks, tutorials and Widgets.

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Hi. Does anyone happen to know if it's possible to apply a Standard Advanced Action to a Button Type that will be used on multiple slides. My project has Home, Back and Next Buttons that I've used on most slides. I've created a Standard Advanced Action for these buttons, but haven't figured out how to apply the advanced action without going through each slide and selecting it from the very long list of Advanced Actions I have for the project. If anyone knows of an easier way to do this it would be very helpful for me. Thanks.
Kim

Kim,
Which version do you use? In Captivate 6 this is possible if you use Shape buttons: you can put them on the Main master slide (or on individual master slides), or time for the rest of the project. Blogged about them:
http://lilybiri.posterous.com/why-i-like-shape-buttons-captivate-6
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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..

Captivate 4 - Advanced Actions - Pause/Play buttons

Hi - So I have created a 2 buttons - a pause and play - so my users can pause/play my captivate video (audio and actual slide). I have created my 2 variables for the buttons and I have created my advanced action. I'm assigning my pause to 'rdcmndPause', hide pause, show play. And I'm assigning play to 'rdcmndResume', hide play, show pause. It's not working. The pause/play buttons appear and disappear like they should - but my project isn't pausing or playing. Any thoughts?

You can create and use Widgets for Adobe Captivate 4 in AS2 as well Mike.
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/Michael
Visit my Captivate blog with tips & tricks, tutorials and Widgets.

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

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