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Participating Frequently
August 18, 2006
Question

Pre-Populate Text Entry Box

  • August 18, 2006
  • 4 replies
  • 902 views
I'm working on an training simulation of a mainframe application and I have fields that are pre-populated in the application that the user will be editing. I have not seen a way to recreate this in Captivate without resorting to Flash, is this correct?

Thanks!
Rory
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4 replies

sprthompson
Known Participant
January 22, 2015

Hi,

It's now 2015 and we're on Adobe Captivate 8 so I was wondering if anybody has solved this one?

Sean

Lilybiri
Legend
January 22, 2015

Default text in TEB or use the Scrolling Text interaction, you can control the value that is displayed by advanced actions.

sprthompson
Known Participant
January 28, 2015

Hi Lilybiri,

Thanks but what advanced action do I need to do to make this happen?

roryfAuthor
Participating Frequently
August 21, 2006
Larry -

No apology necessary, the initial message was written in haste on a Friday afternoon.

Yeah you've reached the same conclusion I had reached on Friday at this point regarding Captivate's native capabilities. That's what prompted the other question regarding Flash. I've seen a few things here and there regarding Flash elements controlling Captivate presentations, I just have to piece it all together.

I'm thinking I want to build the TE itself in Flash and pull it in because I have a large number of places I have to do this for this application.

I tried exporting just that one slide to Flash and I had it working no problem, but reimporting it did not go so well. I think it would work better overall if I can just have the one small Flash element that I pull into my Captivate. I just have to get the ActionScript working to control the Captivate slide - specificly the Success and Failure captions and then getting the slide to continue.

So I'll be experiementing more.

If I find a solution I'll put together a good write-up and post it here.

Thanks!!
Rory
CatBandit
Inspiring
August 21, 2006
Thanks very much for the clear, concise explanation, Rory. Please accept my apologies for missing the real point, which was that you were operating in a different environment that I was (in my mind).

Hmmmmm. Though not too elegant, it can be made to work I think, Rory.

Place the TE box over the current (prepopulated) entry. You may have to play some with the font size and color of your "correct" entry in the TE box...

Set the TE box not to display the text-box frame (untick the selection on the "Options" tab for the TE box).

I hope this makes sense to you. I got it to work in a "practice" project, though both the prepopulated text AND the TE box entry were both slightly visible in the same place on screen . . .
.
CatBandit
Inspiring
August 19, 2006
Have you tried Captivate's text-entry boxes for the task? Seems like you are describing what the TE box is designed to do . . .

I caught your other issue too, Rory, regarding building a Flash object that will pause the slide, display success or failure captions, and move to the next slide . . . and I have to wonder the reasons for both questions.

As I said on the other thread, either I am missing your point entirely, or you are unaware of the functions of the most basic Captivate objects. If that is the case, you might be helped by viewing the six (6) tutorial movies that are built into Captivate's main UI - in the right-side column.
.
roryfAuthor
Participating Frequently
August 21, 2006
Larry -

Thanks for the response. I've veen using Captivate for a while now, so I don't *think* I'm missing this. I'm working on a training simulation of a mainframe application. If you haven't tried recording a mainframe application in Captivate before you may not realize this, but Captivate isn't capable of automatically picking up text entry fields in a mainframe app. It does a great job of capturing a demonstration, I just have to drop in the captions for eveything, which I would be editing anyway, no big deal.

So, here is my problem, I have a screen in my mainframe app. that has prepopulated fields the user will be editing. When I manually insert a TE field I don't see any method for me to prepopulate the field when the slide loads.

For example, in this application:
1. User comes to screen Number 1. On this screen is a field named Action. The Action field is prepopulated with a value of A.
2. In order to advance to screen Number 2 the user must change the value of the Action field from A to D.
3. User presses the Enter key to advance.

Where I run into a problem is Captivate doesn't seem to offer a way in a training simulation to give the Action field a value that can be edited by the user.

Have I missed something really basic here and not realized it?

Thanks!
Rory