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Trihan
Known Participant
July 21, 2011
Question

Conditional for a text input box NOT being null? Sorry for asking so many questions!

  • July 21, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 2664 views

Okay, here's the situation. I'm creating a simulation of a form on which there are several text input boxes, 7 of which are mandatory fields. I know I can use a conditional to check whether the box has nothing in it by creating a null variable with no value and doing "if [box variable] is equal to [null variable] then", but the problem is that the validation captions I need to show need to be shown in order, that is to say that the caption for entering a value for the first box will always be shown if that box is null regardless of the contents of other boxes, the second will be shown if that one is null and the first one isn't etc.

When I was investigating this I noticed a post by Lilybiri saying that comparison with a null variable doesn't work for "not equal to" so I'm having a hard time figuring out how to show the captions based on priority. For example, to show the second caption I need to not only check whether the second box variable is null, but also whether the first one isn't.

It gets pretty crazy further along the line where I get to the 7th mandatory field and need to check whether the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth boxes are NOT null and whether the 7th one IS. Help!

I did come up with one potential solution to this prior to posting: if I set a different advanced action for each input box losing focus which checks whether the variable is null and if so sets a "flag" variable to 0, and in the else set it to 1, I imagine I can then replace the "not equal to" with a check to that flag variable being equal to 1 (which means there is text in the box). I think this will work but I thought I'd check to see if there's an easier way first.

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    1 reply

    RodWard
    Community Expert
    RodWardCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    July 21, 2011

    Are you trying to do this all on one slide?  Why not have one slide per input box and use captions to display variable text?

    Then you can use OnSlideEnter actions to check values as needed.  Also, this strategy allows you to jump back and forth between slides if necessary.

    If you do it right, the user will be none the wiser about how the effect is achieved.

    T
    TrihanAuthor
    Known Participant
    July 21, 2011

    That would work if I were going sequentially through the inputs, but my goal was to make a faithful working recreation of the form, which would require everything to be on one slide.

    RodWard
    Community Expert
    RodWardCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    July 22, 2011

    No it DOESN'T require everything to be on one slide.  It just has to LOOK as if that's what it is.

    I would suggest that it doesn't really matter how many Captivate slides are involved in the final solution, as long as it works the same way (or as close as possible) to the original software that you are simulating.  Your users don't frankly know or care how you achieved the simulation.  I guarantee they won't be thinking of you or Captivate.

    In my experience, you can make creating elearning a lot more difficult than it needs to be in Captivate by trying to rebuild the app, rather than just simulating how it works. For example, thinking that if everything happened on one web page or screen in the app then it must also happen on a single slide in Captivate.  The fact of the matter is IT DOESN'T need to work this way.  And in some cases it might even be impossible to reproduce in Captivate this way.

    So the quickest path to a solution is often to use multiple slides, which has the advantage of allowing you to "fix" certain things on screen (e.g. the contents of fields already visited) by using READ ONLY variable output in transparent captions, focusing only on one element of the interface that the user can interact with on that slide.  It doesn't necessarily prevent you from moving back and forth between elements, just as you can in the original app.  But it is far easier to create and maintain.

    I'm not saying you wouldn't be able to pull this off on one slide in Captivate, but it is going to require a LOT of variables and Advanced Actions to build and debug.  So the term Rapid Elearning becomes something of a misnomer if it takes you a long time to complete one slide.

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