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leonardo_portillo_contractor
leonardo_portillo_contractor
Participating Frequently
October 3, 2019
Question

Text box not submitted on enter

  • October 3, 2019
  • 6 replies
  • 1569 views

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!

 

 

 

      This topic has been closed for replies.

      6 replies

      A
      Anonymous
      October 4, 2019

      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.

      RodWard
      Community Expert
      RodWardCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      October 5, 2019
      Actually, the more likely reason for the failure in this case is that entering something like "=int(($C$2-C5)/365.25)" into a text-entry box in HTML5 output is causing issues because you have several characters included that are used in either HTML or JavaScript code. My bet would be that Captivate's validation coding was never set up to evaluate those types of character combinations. That would be why you can get it to evaluate ordinary words and numbers but not this.
      A
      Anonymous
      October 5, 2019
      So it's a bug.
      A
      Anonymous
      October 4, 2019

      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.

      Captiv8r
      Captiv8r
      Legend
      October 3, 2019

      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 🙂 

      leonardo_portillo_contractor
      leonardo_portillo_contractorAuthor
      Participating Frequently
      October 3, 2019
      Thank you Rick for taking the time to reply. I won't say no, just because. I can give it a try. But it looks like that would leave me at the very same point. I will need to create the text box and the Advanced Action just like before, which will very likely lead to the same issue. Yes, I can give it try but, again, paying hundreds of dollars for workarounds to very simple tasks doesn't look like the best move. Is it not that I'm just overlooking something to click on to have it working? I just need to validate a simple text input before going to the next slide... it's actually veeery simple! I do want to use an Advance Action because I might need other kinds of validations in the future such as date comparisons, simple mathematical operations, etc. It would be very nice to be able to do so on a project from a PPT. Please, help! Thank you.
      Captiv8r
      Captiv8r
      Legend
      October 3, 2019
      Sorry, I must have misunderstood something. I know that the post headline had to do with validating a Text Entry Box. But your reply to Stagprime seemed to suggest that you had a need to create simulations based on PowerPoint slides given to you. As such, I imagined you importing the PowerPoint slides. Then after importing, you would need to visit each slide to add a click box or other interactive element in order to make it a simulation. So what I suggested was intended to save much of that as Captivate would do it for you by recording in the manner I suggested. Apologies for misunderstanding. Rick 🙂
      leonardo_portillo_contractor
      leonardo_portillo_contractorAuthor
      Participating Frequently
      October 3, 2019

      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!

      Stagprime2687219
      Stagprime2687219
      Legend
      October 3, 2019
      You stated something new here that I did not notice in your first post which is that you created a new from PowerPoint project. I would suspect that is part of the issue. What if you re-create using a straight up blank slate?
      leonardo_portillo_contractor
      leonardo_portillo_contractorAuthor
      Participating Frequently
      October 3, 2019
      I didn't state that in my question, I'm sorry. But I thought it wasn't actually relevant because I need to work on projects from Powerpoint presentations. I receive the PPT presentations from the company. They are screenshots from a private system to which I have limited access. There's no way around that. But it should be simple indeed. I import the presentation. On one the slides, I just get a background and a full screen size click box that I delete because I need to force the user to enter valid value into a text box before going to the next slide. Then, I add a text box and follow the steps. Shouldn't it work just like that? If it doesn't... Captivate is not worth it! I hope it's just me needing some more expertise and everything will be fine soon. Would you please help me out to have this working on a project from a PPT presentation? Thank you very much in advance!
      Stagprime2687219
      Stagprime2687219
      Legend
      October 3, 2019

      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.

       

      Stagprime2687219
      Stagprime2687219
      Legend
      October 3, 2019

      Here is what I did to make this work. I am going to try to minimize the steps.

       

      1. Create Text Entry Box
      2. Delete Submit button
      3. Created Advanced Action called ipAdd
        • This action simply says if Text_Entry_Box_1 is equal to a literal  10.10.150.20 - go to next slide
      4. With text box selected choose Execute Advanced Action for the onSuccess action and assign the ipAdd action to it.
      5. Assign Enter as the shortcut

       

      Tested OK

      Hopefully this helps

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