Relative Path isn't working in Captivate 9

[EngilityTrain]

Hello,

I've been using the relative path (docs/document.pdf) to open resource documents such as PDF files in a new window in my captivate projects and they always worked until I upgraded to Captivate 9. The path is not working any more, and opens up a default web browser window instead. Not sure if I'm missing anything. The "docs" folder to call the PDF document is located in the published folders (see image below). I appreciate any advice.

[EngilityTrain · Accepted solution]

Okay, it's been 4 days and I have not received a reply. I contacted the support and I was given the following instructions, in case if you are interested: 

In order to link the document, select the action as " open url or file " and in the path just put the name of the document [document.pdf]. Make sure the document is in the published folder. So lesson learned, keep the documents directly inside the published folder, not any subfolders [docs/document.pdf].

[camillaergo]

Thank for posting your reply. I am having a horrendous time with relative paths not working at all. At least now I know what to do about documents! I've had to come up with a total hack to deal with linking projects/modules in the course I am developing though.

[tonyrisk]

We are having the same problem in Captivate 9 - Relative Path not working.  Apparently this problem occurred in Captivate 7 and they fixed it.  See link to forum discussing it - Captivate 7 and relative file path syntax

Hopefully someone from Captivate will let us know about when they will have a fix

[EngilityTrain]

I hope they'll fix it soon. I agree, it's very messy to keep everything in the published folder, instead of organizing the documents in a subfolder and link them to the project.

[EngilityTrain]

My flash programmer has helped me with linking projects. She has created a shell that hosts all the projects [start.exe] and she uses action scripts to link all the projects together, so I don't have to be worried about linking the projects together. Once I had to use the project aggregator, but I'm not huge fan of it.

[JohnR-ATX]

I thought the issue may have been resolved in an update.

I have a course on a flash drive, and it worked fine with relative directory paths, including navigating UP directory levels.

However, when I tested it on different machine, it didn't work. Turns out it is was only my browser's cache that was being loaded.

Back to the drawing board...

[EngilityTrain]

If you're linking documents to your project, save them in the published folder directly, not inside another folder. When using a link to access the document, just use the document name and the file extension. This should work. 

[JohnR-ATX]

Hi Exelis,

I don't have documents that are being loaded. I'm loading Aggregated Files of multiple Captivate projects.

Folders were used because it was originally intended to be published on my web server, so absolute paths (full URLs) were used. This was just an intelligent way to organize and protect the content and now I want to offer an option for my clients to have a hard copy.

There are over 168 individual Captivate "modules" that make up the entire program, and going in and renaming and republishing them into one directory seems to be the only option at this point.  This is going to require a lot of work and time.

[RodWard]

The Aggregator normally DOES put all the component SWFs of the aggregated projects in a single folder.

You will however need to ensure there are no similarly-named images or other objects across these projects, otherwise you will end up with conflicts.

[JohnR-ATX]

Hi Rod,

I guess it depends on where you publish the folder to.

All of my content is organized into 10 modules with folder names:

Module 1

Module 2

etc.

Thanks for the reminder about the file names. Of course each one of the modules has an "introduction" "review" and other similar files which will all need to be re-named and re-published.

[RodWard]

When you mentioned you were using the Aggregator to link all of these modules up, did you mean you were using the Captivate Aggregator tool or some other aggregation method?

[JohnR-ATX]

Hi Rod,

I'm using the Captivate Aggregator tool to take put together a number of topics within each Module.

For example, Module 1 might have 12 topics. So I end up with a html/swf file with Module 1 with all of the topics tied together with the left-side TOC / Navigation created by Capt. Aggregator.

I have a separate Captivate published project that serves as the main menu that has a shape (working as a button) that links to the aggregated html within each module's folder. The last topic in each module has a link to either to back to the main menu, log out, or go to the next module.

One my web server (I'm not using an LMS), every shape/button link to other modules and to the main menu is an absolute URL.

What I'm trying to do is to get the entire course to work on a flash drive that could be given to anyone and work on any computer, so the relative file names are needed.

If the relative path could use the directory structure, and even " ..\" to go up a directory, that would be awesome! However, since that doesn't work, it looks like everything has to go into one giant folder. I will just need to create a separate html file in the main folder that does an automatic refresh to load the main menu of the program... I haven't tried that yet, but I hope it works.

What other aggregators are there? I love what the Captivate Aggregator accomplishes, but it certainly does have a number of issues!