How-to: Non-Linear Navigation in Captivate Using rdcmndGotoSlide

Yes, it does work now. As many of you who have read my other posts on the subject of Captivate know, I often use a Flash ‘wrapper’ that contains custom navigation controls for controlling loaded Captivate movies. This was an absolute necessity prior to Captivate 2.0, as the navigation bars in Captivate 1.0 and RoboDemo were….ahem….a little too unprofessional looking to me. You know, like those hip ’skinz’ that the kids come up with for skinning Windows Media Player, or WinAmp, etc. Orange and blue, lime green and flourescent purple, etc. Captivate 3 has some decent navigation controls but they are intra-movie. Yeah, there is a ‘menu’ type thing in Captivate but it’s even more useless than the one they had in previous versions. Well, without further digression, here you go:

Click here to view the example swf.

There are three things you must know to use this variable:

1. The slide numbers are based on their index number in the array that Captivate uses internally to keep track of them, and thus, they are zero-based. Just like actionscript arrays. So slide 1 is really slide 0 to Captivate.
2. If you simply use the rdcmndGotoSlide variable to jump to a specific slide, it’ll do it. But the movie will be paused. The rdcmndGotoSlide variable should really be named rdcmndGotoSlideAndPause : ) You can see it in the code sample here, taken from one of the buttons:

   /***********************************************
   * Jumps the Captivate Movie to Slide 3, pauses, then resumes
   ***********************************************/
   three_btn.onRelease = function() {
   myLoader_cld.content.rdcmndGotoSlide = 2; //zero-based array
   myLoader_cld.content.rdcmndPause = 1;
   myLoader_cld.content.rdcmndResume = 1;
   }

3. The problem is, just like in a previous post where I ran into this same scenario, you have to programmatically pause it, even though it’s already paused, in order for the Resume variable to work. I can see how this would be the case as it’s not like the Captivate programmers (or should I say RoboDemo programmers?) were anticipating people using this variable since they have never documented it.

Hopefully, this opens up some new possibilities for you. I am currently in the process of working on an xml-based navigation menu that uses this same variable in order to provide a quick, elegant, and very flexible way for loading/unloading multiple Captivate movies.