Easy way to hide many objects

[danielb51742821]

Hi,

Im going to have about 20 slides in a project. Each slide could have anywhere from 5-20 buttons on it. Each button will open up a grouped set of text objects. I was going to use the state to show/hide each group, but a state can't be applied to a group (bummer).

Do I have to make an advanced action for each button to show the intended and hide all the others? That is a lot of work. 

What is the easiest way to do this? Im using Captivate 2019.

[Lilybiri]

Without having a complete understanding why you need that amount of buttons, and why you need grouped objects it is not so easy to give a complete solution. I can just offer some tips. Have first a look at this blog:

http://blog.lilybiri.com/tip-3-show-slash-hide-or-multistate-object-advanced-slash-shared-actions

You can add multiple objects to a state, and have the normal state seem empty. The action could then be 'Go to Next State' for one multistate object. However you would still need to apply that action to all the multistate objects you have on that slide. You cannot have nested groups (which would have been a welcome enhancement, but obviously not a priority), which would give a solution because you can hide/show a group but you cannot use any state action on a group (another enhancement which never reached the list). 

Anyway I would recommend not to use such an amount of advanced actions, but to prefer shared actions. 

If you could manage it with multistate objects as mentioned before, know that you can reset all multistate objects to the Normal state by re-entering the slide, which I use to label as 'Reset'. Have a look at:

http://blog.lilybiri.com/replay-or-reset-slide

Re-entering a slide in combination with one Go to Next State for each button could make it a lot easier.

[danielb51742821]

Without having a complete understanding why you need that amount of buttons, and why you need grouped objects it is not so easy to give a complete solution. I can just offer some tips.

Answer: I have a requirement to list all employees from a given department on a slide (hence the 5-20 button estimate). Clicking the employee shows 4 items: an image of the employee, Name, Title, a description of that employee's role. Each of the 3 text items are formatted differently. The four items are grouped to avoid the button's action to need to handle displaying one item instead of four, and easily handle the different formatting and be templated.

Attaching an eample of one slide with 8 buttons on the left and one employee's description on the right, I will look at your recommendations.

[Lilybiri]

I would use one multistate object, which has an empty Normal state. You can achieve that by using a shape with Alpha and Stroke both set to 0.

Add as many states as you have buttons. To each custom state you can add as many objects as you want, each styled differently as you showed: Name, Title and Description. Style the first custom state to your wishes. Give it a meaningful state name (maybe name employee). Duplicate that state as many times as needed and edit it. That will keep the layout the same for all the employees.

The buttons now need only the command 'Change State....'. Leave the option 'Retain state....' unchecked for the multistate object.  No need for an advanced action, only be sure that you uncheck 'Continue Playing the project'. When you get to the slide the Normal (empty) state is visible. Whenever you click a button the appropriate info will appear, and you don't need to hide or show anything, and grouping is also unnecessary.

If you need an advanced action, maybe to make sure that the Next button only appears when all buttons have been clicked, prefer a shared action over a multitude of advanced actions to avoid choking the project.