Captivate 6 - Strange Pause Behavior

[swmangold]

Hi All,

I am having a problem with the pause slide action in Captivate.  At the end of each slide, I want the playbar to pause and not automatically forward to the next slide.

Here's what I did to set it up:

1. Under slide properties > action > on exit, set execute advanced action
2. The advanced action is assign cpCmndPause with literal 1

In Captivate versions 3 - 5, that would pause at the final frame of a slide before loading the next slide.  In Version 6, it will forward to the next slide, then pause on the first frame.

I did find a workaround using javascript:

• On slide exit, execute javascript in current window: PauseSlide();
• In the published .htm file, I added the following lines of code after line 11

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">

function PauseSlide(){

     var currFrame = document.getElementById('Captivate').cpEIGetValue('rdinfoCurrentFrame');

     document.getElementById('Captivate').cpEISetValue('rdcmndGotoFrame', currFrame - 2);

}

</script>

Since the advanced action doesn't seem to occur until the first frame of the next slide, this script 'rewinds' the course to the last frame of the previous slide. It's a total hack.

Have you witnessed this too?

I am using the demo version of C6, and have found this behavior in the 64-bit version on win 7 and 32-bit version on win xp

[elearning_dude]

Hi Lilybiri,

There are two reasons why a click box in this scenario is not as good as an Advanced Action to pause the slide -

1. The click boxes take much longer to apply. You have to apply each click box individually to the end of the slide, manually change the timing, etc. Unless each slide in the project is the exact same duration, then a copy and paste of the button to all will still require individual tweaking.

2. I've found that, often, the TOC's "status" flag does not get updated/checked if a click box/button is used. I presume this is because the pause is skipping that very last frame.

I realize this thread/issue is old now, but I just ran into it this morning when trying to publish a project created in Cp 5.5 in Cp 6. It turns out that ANY slide created in Cp 5.5 (or, presumably, earlier) will ignore any Advanced Actions applied to it. In my case, I tried numerous things (deleting/recreating the advanced actions, re-applying them to slides, etc.) and nothing worked. But, if a slide is created from within Cp 6, then the On Exit Advanced Actions work fine.

An example to illustrate further: if you copy slides from a Cp 5.5 project into a Cp 6 project that already contains some slides, then those newly copied slides will not work with the On Exit Advanced Actions whereas the ones native to Cp 6 will. It's a bug, but not the end of the world, unless you uninstalled Cp 5.5 and no longer have it : (

[Lilybiri]

There are some changes in the way Advanced actions do function in CP6, still exploring and will blog about the changes once everything is clarified for me. It is not the upgrade, but the way the On Enter and On Exit events do trigger advanced actions.

You are correct about the TOC, if the slide is not completely visited the slide will not be checked automatically in the TOC. But then I use the TickTOC widget from InfoSemantics.

Lilybiri

[RodWard]

Please note that the TickTOC widget is not compatible with Cp6 at this stage.  Adobe has changed the way the TOC registers slide completions and the way we were detecting that in previous Cp versions with TickTOC no longer works in Cp6.  We've let Adobe know and we're waiting on them to suggest a workaround.  So far nothing.

[Lilybiri]

Thanks for that message, Rod, forgot that the user is on CP6.

[Dan_McCarthy_22]

Hello, has a solution to this been found yet?

Ive only been using Captivate for a week, so could be my inexperience but i seem to have the problem as well.

I have a slide with a button that opens an image. On the image another button closes the image, however if the slides duration has expired when either button is clicked, it proceeds to the next slide.

Any advice would be very appreciated, thank you.

[Lilybiri]

Hello and welcome to the forum,

Hope you do not mind that I was smiling: you are posting on a thread in Advanced Adobe Captivate Users, which is a big contrast to your statement 'I've only been using Captivate for a week'.

This explains also why the original question is totally different from yours, and an answer to that question will not help you. The default behavior of a button is that when it is clicked not only the On Success action is executed (like Open Image) but the playhead is released as well. If you kept the default settings for the button, this means that the playhead will get past the Pausing point (at 1.5seconds) and gets in the inactive portion of the button (after the Pause) and moves until it is either paused again (by another interactive object) or it reaches the end of the slide and gets to the next slide.

First let us know how you configured those buttons? I suppose the image was originally invisible and the success action for the first button was to Show that image. But you also talk about ' another button on the image '? Does this mean that you use an advanced standard action to show both the image AND the close button? Do both buttons have a pause, and if yes, are those pausing points perhaps at the same time on the timeline? Please answer those questions and perhaps post a screenshot of your timeline and the stage with the objects?

Simplest way to me to avoid having the playhead to continue when a button with a simple action is clicked is to replace it by a standard advanced action. But since I first need an answer about how you arranged to have image and close buton appearing at the same time?

Here is an explanation of that difference between simple and standard advanced actions:

http://lilybiri.posterous.com/why-choose-standard-over-simple-action   it has a link to a YouTube video as well.

BTW: which version do you use?

Lilybiri

[Dan_McCarthy_22]

Wow, thank you for the rapid response, im very impressed.

I got to this thread from a google search so sorry for the wrong place, im certainly not an advanced user

After looking through your video I learned how 'Execute Advanced Actions' and this has resolved my issue.

My version is 6

Thank you very very much.

Dan

[Guest]

Lilybiri,

Please help - i tried to follow the link you posted here b/c i am hoping it will answer my questins but i can't seem to get to the video - only an artcle about the video and then when i click the link to watch the video i get asked to log in and get taken to general page - then i try to access again and no luck! Is video still available and how can i access it.

What i have is slides in Cap 6 with advanced actions which show and hide various pop up boxes with information. I want to user to be able to click them in any order and as many times as they want. Then to advance to next slide click the default navigation button for Forward. So when i converted out PPT's over to Cap - the large click box was created - i resized and dragged to a corner and moved taht box on the timeline to the very end.

But i am having problems with interactions working if the timeline reaches the end and don't knwo what to do...

I can't believe something whcih sounds so easy - wanting the slide to not advance until user clicks Forward - can be so complicated...

Thanks,

Regina

[Lilybiri]

The video tutorial is also published on YouTube (plays fine for me from the blog post, do not know what happens for you):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3nKi-DB6Fw&feature=plcp

Lilybiri

[Avinash_Agrawal]

Hi Danny,

PLese use following action for every slide

On slide enter:

slideenter =1

On Slide exit do following conditional action:

If slideenter =1

cpCmndpause = 1

cpCmndGotoFrame=  cpInfoCurrentFrame- slideenter

slideenter = 0;

else

continue

where slideenter is user defined variable set to 0 by default. Try this, let me know if it works ?

Regards,

Avinash

[swmangold]

Avinash - this fix did not work for me.

[Avinash_Agrawal]

Hi swmangold,

May I know what problem you faced ? Can you describe it , if you want I can send you a sample cptx file for which these actions are implemented. PLease provide your email .

Regards,

Avinash