Need to write a script for a button that will "leapfrog" over x amount of slides -.but- with caveats

[sigur_rosser]

Hi. I'm stumped, days of daily scripting are long gone, but here's what I want to do:

I have several courses that contain the same 4 slides in each course, albeit at different starting slide numbers. In my courses, I have a series of 4 slides.  If the user has seen these slides in a different course, I want them to be able to click a button on the first slide of the 4 to bypass that slide, plus further bypass the next set of 3 slides and go straight to the fifth slide in the series.  (I'd prefer to use a shared script as I need to do this for actually 2 sets of slides)

Since these slides are in multiple courses, there is no telling what the actual slide numbers affected will be - they will be independent per course so I can't just hard code a "jump to slide X".  So, to summarize:

Click a button on slide x (let's say slide 11).  That action will then leap frog over the current slide (11) plus the next 3 more slides (12, 13, 14) and re-enter on slide 15.

I can either used a shared script where I pass in variables, or just hard code the script(s).  The name of the slide I want to jump to will also be different per course, and I've noticed the "Jump to" action requires what appears to be the slide number and title.  I just need to go to the slide number and ignore the title of the slide.

Any hints?  I think that when the user clicks the button I'll need to create a variable and assign it to the System variable cpInfoCurrentSlide (?), then add 3 to said variable, then jump to the slide that is essentially cpInfoCurrentSlide + 4.  (But it doesn't look like I can jump to a variable).

I would appreciate any and all help and/or suggestions.  Thanks!!!  I hope this makes sense.

[Lilybiri · Accepted solution]

I may be misunderstand but this is rather easy with an advanced action.  It would look like this:

Expression cpCmndGotoSlide = cpInfoCurrentSlide +3

The reason I use 3, not 4 is the difference in start value for the index: for cpCmndGotoSlide it starts with 0 whereas cpInfoCurrentSlide starts with 1. For your example cpCmndGotoSlide will go to slide 15 if cpInfoCurrentSlide is 11.

I am a big fan of shared actions for several reasons. If you want this to be used in multiple courses I would convert it into a Shared action because it is much easier to transfer a shared action from the original project opened as External Library. No parameter is needed if the jump is always over the same number of slides. If it could be another number I would define the number 3 as parameter. Always keep in mind the difference in index.

[sigur_rosser]

Thank you so much.  I'll be able to try this out later.  Hope it's ok if I have a follow up.

Thanks again!

[Lilybiri]

Sure, maybe one day you'll have some time to read about what I call 'micro-navigation':

https://blog.lilybiri.com/micro-navigation-introduction

[sigur_rosser]

You know, I found that earlier while researching but it was a dead link(?)  However, I just tried your link and it worked!  Looking forward to delving into it.

Thanks again,

S

[sigur_rosser]

Hi.  That worked perfectly!  Thanks so much for the guidance.

The only possible downside is that it obviously leaves the unshown screens uncheked in the Table of Contents.  I suppose that should be taken into account when defining a passing score based on the percentage of screens viewed - if that makes sense (I'm not a SCORM person and there are others that do the packaging and SCORM wrapup.

Thanks again, you are making me look good!

[RodWard]

There is actually a way to have the unvisited slides marked as visited in the TOC.  It's one of the features of the CpExtra HTML5 widget. 

It has a really useful command variable called xcmndcompleteslide.
Information here on how that feature works: 
https://widgetking.github.io/cpextra/variables/command.html#xcmndcompleteslide

[Lilybiri]

Please mark the answer which helped you as being correct, for the sake of other users looking for a solution to a similar problem.

It is never a good idea to base a passing score on a percentage of viewed slides, especially not in this particular situation. You can indeed mark those slides in the TOC using CpExtra, but isn't that a bit confusing to the learner? AFAIK there is no way to hide those slides in the TOC based on a condition, since it will not always happen.

[sigur_rosser]

Done. Thanks!