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Hi there guys!
I'm new to Captivate. I've been using Captivate 2019 version 11.5.0.476 on Windows. I was asked to use it because the company I work for already bought a license.
Everything was going okay until I needed to validate a simple text box before letting the user navigate to the next slide. I only need the user to enter a specific IP address, let's say: 10.10.150.20. These are the steps I have taken:
1. I created a variable called v_ip_address already set to "10.10.150.20". (I have tried both with and without the quotation marks)
2. The text box to be validated is called S03_Text_Entry_Box_1 and has an associated variable with the same name
3. I created an Advanced Action called S03_Address_Validation with a condition that checks if S03_Text_Entry_Box_1 is equal to v_ip_address and only runs one action: "Go to next slide"
4. Then, on the text box to be validated I assigned that Advanced Action called S03_Address_Validation both On Success and On Focus Lost
5. On the text box properties, I clicked on Validate User Input and display Success and Failure captions with a simple message.
6. I chose not to show a submit button. I need it hidden.
7. The text box itself has Enter as shortcut.
The result is:
- When I enter the right input into the text box (10.10.150.20), I always get a Failure message after pressing enter. Nothing else happens.
- Nothing happens when I press Tab. There's actually no other focusable element on the slide. No action is taken anyway.
- After clicking outside the text box, I get no Success message but it does navigate to the next slide.
Here's a couple of questions....
1. Why THE HELL does this freaking software behave like this? I've been trying to have the Enter shortcut working for hours without any success. I have read many many unresolved forum posts about similar issues regarding unexpected Captivate behavior. I haven't seen anything useful. I already lost a whole day of my life that I will never recover, dealing with this buggy Captivate behavior. If it's not buggy... it's at least very veeery far from being intuitive because I'm a web developer and haven't been able to get this working.
2. What do I need to do to have a simple Advanced Action validation working on a simple text box to complete a simple action such as "Go to next Slide". This is freaking me out big time, and I cannot refuse to use Captivate because the company already paid for it. PLEASE HELP! Help me not to hate Captivate this soon. Thank you vey much in advance!
Best regards!
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Here is what I did to make this work. I am going to try to minimize the steps.
Tested OK
Hopefully this helps
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If you wish to utilize the success and failure notifications with validating input - you will need to enter a correct answer in the little box that pops up.
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Thank very much dear Stagprime for taking the time to reply.
Yes, it does work when I reproduce the steps from scratch on a new project from a Powerpoint presentation. I just create the text box, follow the steps and it works. But it seems very buggy, it might be me or my PC though.
When I just load the HTML preview it works fine the first time after entering the correct value. If I enter a wrong value, it does nothing; as intended. But after entering a wrong value, it won't take the correct value either. It just won't validate and proceed by taking any value at all. It looks like it just stops working. I'm not using any Validate User Input options at all. I don't need any workaround, I need this very simple function working because I will need to do basically the same thing in many situations. I will have to validate text boxes against conditions very often. And it's actually something that should be very simple to do, it doesn't seem to be worth to overlook.
Would you PLEEEASE try to reproduce the case again and tell me if there's something I'm overlooking? It shouldn't be this complicated.
Thank you very much in advance dear friend!
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Hi there
I'm wondering if you may want to try this.
Configure the PowerPoint so the slides advance on a click of the mouse. Then start the PowerPoint in presentation mode.
Configure Captivate's recording options so you are recording in "simulation" type mode. Then tell it to record the screen.
Then work your way through the PowerPoint, taking care to click where the user would click to "advance" things.
Once you have finished and stopped the recording, you should have the basics you need to create the simulation, You will likely need to add things like the text boxes and suchlike, but I would think the bulk of what you need should be there.
Cheers all... Rick 🙂
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Hi RodWard. I'm sorry I took long to reply. Thank you for your comment. First, I'd like to apologize if you or anybody else felt offended by any of my comments. I see you are an Adobe Community Professional and I feel your comment to be extremely defensive. As you can easily see, I have opened every and each of my comments thanking others for taking their time to reply to my questions, and I think they have been very nice. I truly think you have misused of couple of terms in your comment or maybe, you haven't had the time to read my comments thoroughly. Since you think my comment was "denigrating", let me please further explain my point and thus give it a try to contribute something of value to the discussion. Our dear partner Stagprime, who has been very kind to try to help, literally wrote: "I never use the 'from PowerPoint' option - too many frustrations with control of content". And that's where my point comes up. I think a "professional" workaround is something that you do to cope with something that hasn't been coded into a system, or that hasn't been already covered by the scope of a project. Finding a software to be "frustrating" or maybe "too complicated" is NOT a valid reason for a workaround. Why? Very simple. If something is complicated, troublesome or frustrating, a professional will need make an important decision... we can solve it by making it work properly, or we can determine that the right course of action is to make use of a different tool to achieve the desired results. When I deliver results to my clients, I strive to deliver results... not workarounds. If you are expecting me to use workarounds, don't charge me money for that because I'm the one actually working it around, not you. Any tool could be very powerful in the right hands, like you said. A pencil for example, an artist can draw a masterpiece with a $2 pencil. But, what if the artist bought a $400 pencil that ends up not giving what it was intended to do? Does it make any sense? That's exactly what I see in this situation comparing what I can do with Captivate and with many other open source front-end development tools. If I need to be an artist to use Captivate... give me the $2 pencil, not the $400 one... please! You said that Captivate doesn't need to do everything I wanted it to. (Tough words because you're very far from understanding my original question in this discussion). I have been asking about a SIMPLE validation on a very SIMPLE project imported from a SIMPLE PPT presentation, which is EXACTLY what Adobe has been offering us for those $400. It's very very clear that I haven't been asking for something that I just want to happen, just because. You didn't have to say that I want to live in a world where everything works just like I wanted it to, that's actually offensive from an Adobe Community Professional and you could just end up pushing away from your community potential customer like me who already work for big companies that could buy other products in the future. Now I'm afraid next time I ask a question about a SIMPLE process or feature that HAS BEEN OFFERED by Adobe, I will receive a defensive comment from one of you Adobe Professional guys saying that this is not a perfect world. Please, don't get me wrong but, I'm not asking anybody to make the world perfect for me. Just help Adobe fulfill their promises for which they charge us money. If Captivate is intended to be able to import content from PowerPoint, create interactions and validate inputs seamlessly... just make it happen. Users are finding it "frustrating". Otherwise, give me the $2 pencil. I'll be much happier using workarounds after having paid $2, not $400. As I said before, I need to keep using Captivate because the company already paid for it. But just let me get some better control of the position and help them make a better decision soon.
Best regards!
P.S. This is not anything personal, this a professional matter.
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Not just you. I've used validating text entry boxes as a technique in the past and it's worked OK. However, I've got one now that just won't do anything in exactly the same way you describe, so I came here for the first time in ages in desperation. Looks like yet another intermittent bug that nobody will do anything about.
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Leonardo, I think I'm getting somewhere. My text entry box is supposed to be completed with "=int(($C$2-C5)/365.25)" and this, when published on the LMS, just sits there when you hit the 'submit' button. If I change the Correct Entry to a simple word, like "horse" it works fine. There are other places where Captivate struggles to distinguish between values and strings, so this might be one of them. If it's expecting a string and you give it something that it thinks is a value, it might just sit there and sulk.
Obviously, narrowing the bug down a little doesn't solve the problem. I tried putting the Correct Entry in quotes and inverted commas but that didn't work.
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