Advanced actions window not responding

Report · Sep 01, 2016

I have a project where the user needs to enter the birth year, than Captivate calculates how old is he/she and for each age different text appears. I had an idea how to solve it, calculate the age and after that to create conditional triggers
If user is 1 show textbox1

if user is 2 show textbox2

...

if user is 18 show textbox18

But, after setting around 30 conditional actions, adobe captivate freezes and not respond, so I have to end the process with the task manager and lose all my work. This happens all the time.
First I had 32bit version on 64bit OS, than I installed the 64bit version, run the software as an administrator (run as administrator was the solution to a similar problem here on the forums), but nothing helps.

Does anybody know how to solve this, somebody had similar problem maybe?
Thanks.

Report · Sep 01, 2016

I've often had Captivate running projects with hundreds of variables and scores of Advanced Actions without experiencing crashing issues.

What are your system specs?

What version of Captivate are you running?

What other programs are you running at the same time?

Report · Sep 01, 2016

Are you talking about 30+ decisions in one conditional action? Was it not possible to realize this in another way? Maybe by using states (if you are on CP9)? What is so different about the 'textboxes' based on the age? Couldn't it be done by inserting variables instead of having 30+ different text containers?

Report · Sep 02, 2016

Now the situation is not with textboxes but with images. I had previously situation with text boxes, but let me try to explain you this problem. I am asking the user to write how old is he/she and than scribble the same amount of squares (on the image the user is 18 years old). Than, I have to ask him when is he planning to retire and make the squares grey after the retirement age (on the image the user is planning to retire at 64).

The way I thought could be solved is to insert the scribbles for every age, hide them at the beginning and ask:

If variable for age is 1, show scribble 1

If variable for age is 18, show scribbles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ..., 18.

This means that we will have 110 decisions. After the 30-40 decision, the pc started crashing and it was impossiblle to finish.

Even if I was using states I would need 110 decisions again, for each age number. Plus I would not know how will an object with 110 states react.

What I have done to solve it is to create 11 identical slides. First slide to open if the user is aged 1-10, second to open if the user is 11-20 etc. (first 10 scribbles will not be hidden now) and put conditional actions with 10 decisions on each slide. Example, the advanced conditional actions on the second would be
if variable age is 11, show scribble 11
if variable age is 17, show scribble 11,12,13,...,17.

Now, the problematic part comes, because I have not started working on the retirement part, making the boxes gray. The process should be the same as explained before, but now I will have to create much more slides and it is much more exhausting.

Btw, I have i7 processor, 16gb ram, ssd hd, which makes me think that configuration is not a problem. I am using Captivate 9 and have dropbox and sometimes google chrome opened. Nothing more.

Do you think this is possible to be done in an easier way?

Thanks for the help.

Report · Sep 02, 2016

I would need some more time to reflect, but certainly wouldn't do it your way. Too bad Captivate has no way to 'loop' an action. To have a loop you would need JS, and this is certainly a use case for JavaScript. You should use states instead of images as well.

To show their age in a text containers would be pretty easy, just insert the variable that has the calculated value in a text container.

Report · Sep 02, 2016

I would love to hear how would you solve it?
And also, I just want to hear opinion, has someone did a project with advanced actions with 100 decisions in it, did it worked ok? The more decisions I write, the saving process is slower, and when I wrote something like 35-40 decisions, the software freezes and not responding. Cannot write more.

Report · Sep 06, 2016

If this is html5 it would be easy to do with a loop:

For the age,

var getAge = window.yourAgeVariable;

for ( var i = 0; i < getAge; i++ )

{

cp.show("scribble" + i + 1)

}

It would be best to put this in an external function and call it from the script window.