November 18, 2011

Enabling Forced Navigation for Your Interactive Screens in Adobe Captivate 5.5

You have created an interactive screen that you are proud of. You show it to the customer. Overall, he likes the screen, but requests you to hide/disable the Next button till the learner has clicked all the interactive objects on the screen. The customer wants to make sure the learners view the content linked with each interactive object before moving on to the next screen.

As an eLearning professional, you don’t believe in forced navigation and have made the content interesting enough to engage the learners. But you need to implement the changes suggested by the customer.

Don’t you get into such a situation once in a while? Here’s how you can quickly enable forced navigation for your interactive screens created in Adobe Captivate 5.5.

Take a look at this example screen. The Next button will appear only after you have clicked all the five tabs.

Here are the steps you need to follow to implement this functionality:

  1. Create your interactive screen. Here are the demonstrations for creating:

  2. After creating the interactive screen, insert a button, label it as Next, and uncheck Visible.

  3. Set the On Success action to Go to the next slide.

  4. Click Project > Variables and add new variables. The number of variables should be equal to the number of interactive objects on your screen. In this example, I have added five variables, namely, A1, A2, A3, A4, and A5 to match with the number of tabs.

  5. Modify the Standard Action defined for each interactive object to include a statement where you assign a value of 1 (or any other number you can think of). In this example, for the first interactive object, I have assigned A1 with a value of 1, for the second object, assigned A2 with a value of 1, and so on.
  6. Now select the slide and change the On Enter action to Execute Advanced Actions.
  7. Click the folder icon to define the action.
  8. Create a new conditional action, where you can check the values of the variables and set a condition to display the Play button once all the interactive objects are clicked and values of all the variables have changed to 1.

  9. Update and close the Advanced Actions dialog. Ensure that the script associated with the On Enter action for slide is the conditional action you just created.

  10. Preview the screen. It will work as intended.

 

So, the next time you are asked to add forced navigation to your interactive screens, don’t fret! Follow these simple steps to enable this functionality.

Happy captivating! :)

Posted by poojajaisingh8:10 PM
  • Jackson12

    Great use of advanced actions, but shows a limitation. If you allowed an advanced action to call another advanced action, you could greatly reduce the coding here. If you have an action “HideAll” that hide all the objects, you wouldn’t have to write that code for each demo. Basic programming 101. Something we’d love to see in Cp6.0.

  • Jim

    Thanks for this. Perfect timing. So, take this one step further. Can I hide a button until a video object or slide video ends? Forcing student to play the whole video before proceeding.

    • http://twitter.com/poojajaisingh Dr. Pooja Jaisingh

      That should be simple Jim. Just position the Next button in the timeline after the video ends.

  • http://twitter.com/GuyKat GuyKat Solutions

    Very Neat. Thanks!

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Amy-Blankenship/743874381 Amy Blankenship

    How would you do this if you wanted to disable/enable just the next button on the button bar included on the skin? I have figured out how to show or hide the whole thing, but not specific buttons (this is useful if you want to keep exit available in the question parts of a quiz, but enable free navigation during the instructions).

  • Miles

    Excellent… is there any way to show/hide a slidelet? I’d like to have interactivity within each tab page that can be scored… but producing the .swf’s in another session might preclude scoring.

    • http://twitter.com/poojajaisingh Dr. Pooja Jaisingh

      Yes Miles, you can show/hide a slidelet as well. Just uncheck the Visible checkbox for Rollover Slidelet Area.

  • Miles

    I’m having some trouble with this one… it seems that the advanced action for the slide only checks once… it doesn’t update to check the status of the other variables until it is reopened.

  • Miles

    I just double checked… with a setup nearly identical to what is shown, after clicking each button, I have to back out to a previous slide and revisit the tabbed slide for the conditional action on entry to show the next button. Using CS5.5… Lilybiri has a fix that will work…

    Check out the “correct answer” section if you’re having similar issues…

    http://forums.adobe.com/message/4046433#4046433

  • Pingback: The Push to Go Paperless

  • Subscribe to RSS feeds
  • Loading

  • Categories

  • Archives

  • Authors

  • Recent Comments

    • Nora17: Very useful information.
    • ismael: The lines of code used in the presentation to hide the navigation buttons can be replaced with the following...
    • Glenn: Worked here too. Phew!
    • Anjaneai Srivastava: Thanks a ton! Much needed!
    • Kindle covers: This is pretty nice information. Adobe has been my favorite.

  • Captivate & eLearning Videos

    Subscribe to Adobe eLearning on YouTube.

    Check out the latest eLearning Videos on AdobeTV

  • Live and on-demand eSeminars

    Attend a free eSeminar to learn how to create engaging eLearning content with Adobe Captivate 5.