"Unknown Error" on preview and publish, captivate 2019

[Lyssa5C2A]

Every single CBT I have created is now generating "unknown error" at the end of assessments. Even courses that have previously run completely fine and have been live on my companies LMS for months with no issue. I was advised by adobe to update Captivate to version 11.8 (which I have done) and that this would fix it, and it hasn't.

I have done the trouble shooting of copying and pasting slides to a fresh project to test if they run, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which slides are corrupting or not. I have some instnaces of sides being completely fine indpendently, but as soon as I put them together, they generate the "unknown error", some that will not generate the error during one preview but will during another. It's sometimes even generating the "unknown error" on a brand new, blank project made from scratch to test.

Changing publishing settings does not seem to affect this at all.

 I have 2 years worth of CBT development (Almost 100 separate courses saved) that is now not functional and to rebuild from scratch will take months.

Any advice or known factors that can cause this error, please?

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

If this suddenly started happening without you having changed anything on the actual course packages on the LMS then the most likely explanation is that something changed in your LMS and that's where the issue is.  Quickest way to find out is test on a different LMS.

Get one of the SCORM zip packages that is generating this error and upload it to SCORM Cloud online LMS to test whether the same issue occurs there.  (You can get a free account for SCORM Cloud and test packages up to 100 megabytes in size.)

If it doesn't generate the same error message when viewed on SCORM Cloud then I would be blaming your LMS.

[Lyssa5C2A]

Hi,

Would that still be the case even when previewing from Captivate itself? The settings are all for the LMS but I haven't uploaded anything to the LMS in weeks (because of this issue), it's all occuring on the local preview.

[RodWard]

OK. I may have confused what you were saying.

So are you saying that the courses currently residing on your LMS are all still playing fine and it is only on your own system when you Preview as HTML that you see this mysterious "unknown error"?

When you updated to Captivate 11.8.1 (as suggested by Adobe) did you follow all instructions in the Release Notes and reset your Preferences as well as delete the specified folders on your system that related to theme files etc?  If you didn't follow those instructions when you upgraded Captivate then that might be the cause of the issue.

[Lyssa5C2A]

That's correct - anything currently live seems to be fine (there are some other issues with the LMS that has been causing loading errors, but not the "Unknown error"), but anything locally previewed is causing issues. It started doing this suddenly a few weeks ago, and I updated after that but it hasn't resolved it. 

I think I followed everything correctly, however I think you were correct to begin with. I re-tested a number of courses that had been an issue, now using standard scorm settings, and they previewed absolutely fine on every standardised setting. As soon as I turned them back to the custom LMS setting, it gave me the error again.

I have raised it to my company IT support, as there have been a lot of updates and changed to the LMS that has caused a number of other errors, so it's very likely that something has affected this as well.

Thank you for the help! It wasn't something I had thought of checking

[RodWard]

I think this is the first time you had mentioned that you have customised SCORM settings that you use for your LMS.  If standard SCORM settings work fine but your custom settings result in the error, then I would feel there is likely to be some code in that customisation that is tripping up Captivate HTML5 during preview.  You may need to find someone in your IT team that knows how to program and to read the data in the browser console to debug the error.