Some question and answer text missing from activity report

[francesj65022182]

Hi All

I am working in Captivate 8.  I have an assessment that contains a question bank of 16 questions, 9 of which are randomly pulled.   It is recording the score correctly and completing if user passes.  However in the reports, data is missing for some of the questions and some of the answers.  When I take the question text out of the question, and leave minimal characters in it reports OK.  When I put the full question back in lose the question text in the report.

The question text seems to disappear for the same three questions, and is there in full for all the other questions.

I have checked and all the interaction IDs are unique for each question.

Is there a maximum length for questions in a question pool?

Any ideas?

[RodWard]

You may have some punctuation characters in the text for those questions and these characters could be fouling things up in the output.  You need to be careful about including any characters that also happen to be commonly used in web programming code.

Examine the text in those problematic questions.  Are there any ampersands, full colons, chevrons etc?

[francesj65022182]

Hi Mark, thanks for the super speedy response.  There was one ":" in the first question that the question text is missing from. The others don't have anything  you mentioned.  I removed the ":" and republished.  But unfortunately the question text is still missing from the report for that question.  I did take all the text out, put it through notepad, and delete within the text box, in case there was anything odd in there, but unseen.   

Do you think I need to rebuild the 3 problem questions from scratch?

Cheers  F

[RodWard]

You could try just putting in a much smaller amount of text to see if the issue is that you've exceeded some limit.

If that doesn't work then by all means rebuild them.

[francesj65022182]

Thanks Rod,  a question box would appear to have a character limit.   I have cut down the questions and it is now reporting all questions.  I now just need to work out what that character limit is!   I will post back when I think I have an answer.  Thanks so much for your help.  

[RodWard]

See if it is around 150 characters.  That's the usual character limit that seems to apply to User Variables in Captivate.  Perhaps it will end up being significant here as well.

[francesj65022182]

Looks like the character limit is 250 characters including spaces, I think.  Does that ring true to you?

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

Possibly.  Earlier versions of Captivate DID have the ability to save up to 250 characters to a variable.  However, later versions dropped that amount to 150 for some reason.  You're on Captivate 8, right?

If I were you I would try to keep my characters under 150 just in case your course later gets upgraded to a later version of Captivate.  If this limit happens to get reduced then the person whose job it is at that time to work out why it suddenly started misbehaving after upgrade won't lose their hair.

[francesj65022182]

Thanks Rod, that is great advice.  Really appreciate the help and the speedy responses.