Reusing slide interactions?

[jeffrey.resnik]

I have a series of 30 slides. On each slide, I want to have the same interaction and groups:

Click a button to show/hide a group.

In that group, click button to show/hide another group.

The makeup of the groups – ie. Background images and text caption format/layout/etc. remains constant, but within each of the above groups, the content of the images and text captions will change from slide to slide to make them relevant to the individual slide content in which they appear.

When I copy or duplicate the groups to use them in additional slides, the group/object names are no longer valid, so of course, the Advanced Actions to show/hide the groups do not function in the new locations.

It took quite a while to create the original scripts and the object names they reference. What approach should I be taking to avoid having to recreate all of these each slide? I tried Shared Actions but that still requires me to select a group/object name from a list of all names in the project. The object names no longer have any meaning having been renamed to numbers. I would still have to rename these then manually select them to build a script that works.

Using Captivate, is there a more efficient way to accomplish this? Should I be taking a different overall approach?

[Lilybiri]

Which version? Using shared actions could help.

[jeffrey.resnik]

Hi Lilybiri,

Sorry - CP8.

Regards,

Jeff

[Lilybiri]

CP8 has full functionality for shared actions. Have a look at my blog

http://blog.lilybiri.com

[mark_mark_mark]

Six years later and I'm running into this issue (Mac Cp 2019). Is there a way to populate variables with the names of slide objects (buttons, text boxes, object groups, etc.)? Then we could use a shared action to populate the variables on each slide and have the advanced action reference the variables. Does that make sense? Am I overthinking this? Is there an easier or more obvious way? @jeffrey.resnik, did you ever figure this out?

@Lilybiri, I'll give your blog another look. However it's a pretty specific issue. I've been trying to use shared actions, but just not sure how to have advanced action reference slide object when reused accross slides (since every object in project has unique name). It would be so much easier if they let the objects have names repeated on different slides. Seems easy enough, since project wide the objects could reference slide and object.

Thanks for any help anyone can offer.

Mark 

[Lilybiri]

You would need JS in that case, or perhaps the CpExtra widget by InfoSemantics, Australia. 

I use shared actions in that case, and what you would like to have in variables will be parameters.  Have a crash course about Use of Shared actions on my blog and I presented about that topic a couple of times.

May I add a comment to your last 'request'?  Except for objects which are ttimed for the rest of the project and keep their unique ID, your suggestion would lead to a complete mess. If an image has the same name for all instances, and you want to hide one of them with an action (even from a different slide) all images would be hidden. Even worse: if that image also appears in a state of a multistate object, it would be hidden as well.