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bills89323792
Inspiring
July 27, 2016
Question

Assign variable and then check that variable (advanced action)

  • July 27, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 649 views

Ok, I think I'm still missing a fundamental concept here in Captivate. In an advanced action on a button click, I want to assign variable A with another variable B.  Then I want to use a different tab in the advanced action - if the new value for variable A is x, then do something.

The problem is that the second tab checks the variable A value immediately, before it's assigned with variable B - and even if I put a short delay at the start of the action chain.  Do I need a widget to do this?

The only way I can manage this now is to assign variable A with B and then go to a different slide and on enter, trigger the next chain of actions and then immediately go to the previous slide, but this looks kind of rough.

I appreciate any advice.

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    1 reply

    Lilybiri
    Lilybiri
    Legend
    July 27, 2016

    What you described could be due to a failure in the logic. All commands in an advanced action are always evaluated in the sequence they appear: from top to bottom, and for the decisions in a conditional action from left to right.

    If you could post a screenshot of the Preview of that conditional action, maybe I could detect the flaw? For Preview, use the first button in the top control panel of the Advanced Actions dialog box. That way you'll see all decisions (Then/Else) at once. I think you use the term 'tab' for decision. I try to use always the official terminology as it appears in Captivate's Help.

    B
    bills89323792Author
    Inspiring
    July 27, 2016

    Thanks- that all makes sense.  I'm going to check my decisions again before I trouble you further.

    I do have a slightly related question.  What is the biggest difference between a "shared" action and an "exported" action.  It seems like I can just duplicate an exported action.

    Paul Wilson CTDP
    Community Expert
    Paul Wilson CTDPCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    July 28, 2016

    If you have a need for a similar advanced action to be used at different points in your project you can save it a single version of the shared action with placeholders (usually objects or variable) that you can fill in for each iteration of the advanced action. It's easy to create a shared action once, rather than recreating it over and over as separate advanced actions.

    An exported shared action is useful when you wish to use a shared action in a different Captivate project. Shared actions appear in your library. From there you can export them as a .cpaa file and then import them into another project. Same benefit of not having to type out an advanced action multiple times, but in this case across multiple projects and not just within a single project.

    Here is the Adobe documentation on the procedures for this.

    Shared actions in Adobe Captivate projects

    Paul Wilson, CTDP
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