How to automatically include folder of files to Captivate Project preview and zipped publish output?

Hey there,

I do what you are talking about all of the time.....I shared how I was including speical external files (that work both when published and previewing...at this following Adobe discussion link: https://community.adobe.com/t5/captivate-discussions/html-interactive-chart-display/m-p/10968533#M278468

I've been using the idea I shared in that above link for many years...and it has worked worderfully - especially if you want to implement standard JS related support libraries for your CP projects. 

Sorry to be so late to the party, I just saw this post as I was searching for something else...

Like Rod, we accomplish this by making custom widgets. But we add them during authoring, not the headless method. We have different widgets for different functionality. Most of our widgets do not contain any content (images and text) but rather JS and CSS. 

If you need to add a glosssary, insert the glossary widget.

If you want to collect user feedback - add the feedback widget.

And so on.

When you publish the widget files are all added to the publish .zip file. (Inserting javascript and css). 

The only caveat is that, at runtime, widgets are inserted via i-frames. So that can limit the functionalllity, depending on what you are trying to do.

phd4, after reading the replies from Stagprime and RodWard, I became aware that I forgot to mention, that if the folder js/ within HTML/assets  does not exist (this is the case by default) you'll have to create it manually.

Klaus

Perhaps now I see the root of your other post regarding Preview/Publish.

I wouldn't mind knowing this as well.

I had once thought I might be able to modify the HTML file that is used at publish time to always include other JS files but that file points to an array that when published, points to the assets/js folder where we drop that file and have to add the path.

pre-publish

post-publish

I am not sure where Captivate is grabbing the JS libraries from or how they are being included in this array but I agree that would be an awesome timesaver.

One more thing: my answer assumes that you want to add 'automatically' javascript to your Cp projects. Any other 'files' or 'folder of files' would be a different issue. Similar maybe but not the same!

Klaus

Hi phd4,

you can! I'm doing it in a way and I can't really claim that it is entirely my solution. Reading posts from people here on the forum like Stagprime or TLC Media Design was helpful to find 'my' way.

It is a bit 'hacky', though. I'm on MacOS, hence my explanation is mac-based, but it works on Windows as well.

Find the application/programme-folder of your Captivate installation. Go there to the HTML folder. Within it find the index.html and open it in text editor (like Brackets, Notepad etc.). index.html is the template file, which is used by Cp always when you publish or preview to HTML5 in a browser. Now in this index.html I added the following code after the second </script> end tag. It is approximately in line 168. Add something like this

<!-- custom added -->
<script src="assets/js/initmodule.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<!-- END custom added -->

(the filename initmodule.js is valid in my case, you have to adapt that to your needs.)

Then make sure, that your javascript file(s) is/are copied to HTML/assets/js within the same Cp installation-folder.

This works for publish and preview cases.
Be careful, though. Should you update your Cp version you will have to repeat everything. And if you are working on several Cp projects at the same time, it is advisable to edit your javascript you want to embed in this way outside the HTML/assets/js folder and everytime you preview or publish, Save a copy from your editor to HTML/assets/js.

This works for me very well

Good luck

Klaus