August 13, 2009

Say hello to Advanced Actions!!

,,,,

You are creating a quiz in your e-learning project in Adobe Captivate. You intend to grant grades(such as A, B,C) to students based on the percentage scored by a student out of total score.

How will you do it?? Well, Advanced Actions can help you.

Adobe Captivate allows to execute actions i.e. “Execute advanced action” on various events that happen within a captivate movie while the movie is playing. These events include On slide enter/exit, On interactive object’s success/failure condition, When a text entry box loses focus, when user rollovers/clicks the rollover area of rollover slidelet object, question slide’s success/failure condition etc.

This post intends to teach you create an advanced action and add statements to it. So without wasting any time let’s get down to the business…

How to create an Advanced Action:

  • Goto  ‘Project’ menu and select ‘Actions’ menu-item.
  • Actions Dialog comes up.
  • Select the ‘Advanced Actions’ tab.

So now you know how to create an Advanced Action. Pretty easy!  Right??

Now we would learn how to actually add statements to this Advanced Action. When I say statements to the advanced action it means the various activities this advanced action is supposed to do. But before that a small pill of basics about Advanced Action:

Using Advanced Actions you can use the following options to define actions in Captivate:

  • Condition – provide if…else conditions with and/or operators.
  • Assignment – can assign value/variable to both Captivate exposed and user created variables.
  • Standard action – you could use a single advanced action to run multiple actions in a sequence.

Now in order to understand how to add statements to your actions, let us first define a problem:

Say in your e-learning project, upon a button click the following should happen:

Solution:

  • Insert a button.

So your advanced action is ready. This advanced action gets executed when a user clicks on the button. In my next post I would explain how to use conditional statements in advanced actions. Till then I would advise you all to get your hands dirty with advanced actions.

Posted by Manish Anand5:15 PM
  • Sunny

    Thanks for the helpful information.Question: If I’m having trouble integrating multiple autplaying swf animation in my Captivate. Will including advanced actions stop these files from playing simultaneously when the project SWF plays? Your suggestions or a later discussion would be very helpful!

  • Manish Anand

    Hi Sunny,I am not sure whether I understand your case. It would be really nice if you could tell me you r use-case. Probably then I would be in a better position to help you out.

  • amin

    is there any way to make an action which assign cpCmndGotoSlide to random slide ?i wanna make my quiz using interactive slides not question slide and i want the question to be in random order

  • xtutor

    Hi, I am trying to create a cloze on one slide, i.e. several text entry boxes and only one submit button and one point awarded for each correct text entry. So far without any success. The default quiz maker in captivate requires the presentation to have one button for each text entry box. How can advanced actions help me? Thank you in advance.

  • Bob Moran

    I am trying to create a demonstration using variables and advanced actions to create a simulation of typing in command line commands. I have the variable set to cmdPrompt in my Text Entry box. I want to setup something like this: cmdprompt>(enter temp) -> takes you with the jump to slide to the temp slide. I am getting jammed with the syntax of the advanced actions on how to setup the logic.

    I have tried:
    Check if (cmdPrompt is equal to temp)
    Begin newline
    Jump to slide temps.

    I want to have multiple if-thens to setup for the fans, vpd and so on so that it looks like the user is actually typing in commands and receiving the correct output from the command

  • Intj57

    Hi,

    When I create a standard quiz in captivate on the Quiz Results page there is a Continue button. If the person fails the quiz they can either retake the quiz, review the quiz or just continue (exit). If the person passes, they are supposed to continue onto the page where another URL opens and they get their certificate. Everything works fine when you press F12 in Captivate, but when you go to the directory and try to run the HTML file that has the other necessary published files in it, and you run through it, the Continue button doesn’t work when the person passes the quiz and open up the URL. Why does it only work in the PreLoader in Captivate?

    • Manish Anand

      Hi,
      Couple of things:
      1. Is the pop-up blocker off for the browser that you are viewing your file in? If no, please turn it off and then try playing the content again.

      2. Please make sure, that the action ‘Open URL or file’ is set correctly in the preferences dialog at Quiz -> Pass or Fail.

      In case, you are not able to resolve the issue, please write to me at maanand (at the rate of) adobe (dot) com.

      -Manish

  • Joanne

    I am faced with a marking issue: if the learner deviates up or down from the correct answer, there are different ways to calculate their end mark: if the learner answers 3 incorrect underscores or overscores, they fail; if the learner answers 2 each of an underscore or overscore they also fail. However, 3 incorrect answers of either 2 underscores and 1 overscore or 2 overscores and 1 underscore – they will pass. How can let captivate know how to mark this? Any help is appreciated!

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