To try them, I decided to create something useful (for once!) by putting together a sort of ‘user progress’ slide. The premise is that there is one central slide that is a ‘jump-off’ or starting point for users to go to various parts of the slide deck (ie, various parts of the course). Once there, they view the content and then return back to the main/start slide and that particular section of the content that they went to previously is marked as ‘completed’ (symbollicaly, of course) by ’show’ing a graphic on the slide.

If that confusing description hasn’t scared you off already, I’ll quit trying to describe it and just show you the damn thing. Here is a link to the working example, and what follows on this page is a walkthrough of how I did it.

Track User Progress with Actions and Variables in Captivate 4

It works well and I will definitely use this type of thing for tracking intra-course progress. Of course I won’t use images of doors, but if you imagine a bulleted list of topics instead, where instead of a standard ‘bullet’ there is a checkbox next to each topic or image, and then when the user has viewed that topic and returned to the main slide the checkbox is checked.

So – how does it work?

I wish I could just paste the code, but I can’t – Captivate won’t let me copy/paste code to/from the Actions window, which sucks. There are serious limitations with the scripting capabilities of Captivate 4, but heck, I think we all expected it to be limited considering it’s brand new. So, here’s how I did it:

Step One – Create Slides

I created a total of 9 slides, each with picture of doors that I grabbed off google images. On the first slide I left the image intact. On the remaining 8 slides, I used Captivate’s new image editing crop feature (works great) to crop the ‘doors’ image on each slide to show just it’s corresponding door.

On the first slide (the one with all the doors) I inserted blue checkmark objects and gave them each an object name of “chkX”, where X was equal to 1 through 8 (for each door). I made each of those checkmark symbols not visible by default, by unchecking the ‘Visible’ checkbox in the options tab for the symbol.

Step Two – Create User Variables

Then, I created a set of User variables – one for each of the doors, and assigned them each a value of zero (0):

User Variables

Step Three – Create Custom Actions

Next, I created two custom actions:

Check Doors Viewed Custom Action Code

The first action I created I named “Check Doors Viewed” and this was by far the most time-consuming part of the process, mostly because the actions window is SLOW when inputting anything more than a few lines of code. Please let me know if you experience this slowness too. So if you look at the outlined code block you can see what is happening. In plain-speak:

Check to see if the door1 variable is equal to 1 and if it is, then make the chk1 symbol visible. The chk1 symbol is the object name for the blue checkmark that sits over top of the first door. I then kept going and added the same code for each door/checkmark (for a total of 8 in my example).

Step Four – Set Slide ‘On Enter’ Property

I then went into the slide properties for the first/main slide (the one with all the doors) and, on slide enter, I set it to run the Check Doors Viewed action so that it will enable any checkmarks that need to be made visible:

Slide Properties for Main/First Slide

Step Five – Add a ‘Clear Checkmarks’ Button

I then decided to add a ‘clear checkmarks’ (ie, clear progress) button to the main slide. I set that button’s properties so that, when clicked, it runs the ‘Clear Checkmarks’ custom action, which has this code in it:

The actions window is fixed in size, so I couldn’t capture all the code in one screenshot, so here’s the rest:

Clear Checkmarks Action, Part Two

Note that highlighted last line, where I have it ‘reload’ the 1st slide. I did this so that, when slide one is restarted, it will trigger the previous direction to run the ‘Check Doors Viewed’ action from before.

That’s about it. I have the source available for download here.

Reflections

All in all it’s fairly straightforward and easy to use. Keep in mind that I’m a pretty decent actionscript coder, and have also done some Java coding in the past, so I’m comfortable scripting. The one thing that is really annoying is that the actions window gets *really* slow/sluggish if you are trying to do anything that needs more than a few lines. Another huge problem is that you cannot execute two actions in sequence. In other words, I couldn’t set the ‘On Enter’ slide to execute multiple USER actions – you can execute multiple system actions, but not actions you create. So there was no way to do something like, “on slide enter, execute the Clear Checkmarks action and then execute the Check Doors Viewed action”.

I really hope that Adobe can fix the sluggishness of the Actions window, or better yet allow for actions to be imported as text files. I realize they have to ensure that the code/syntax is legit before it can be applied, so perhaps some sort of validation check can be built into the import. Better yet, just have an actions window, like in Flash, complete with a ‘check syntax’ button. That would be so much faster. But more pressing to me is the need to be able to execute multiple custom actions.

Am I off-target? I definitely could be. Please leave a comment if I’m missing something in regards to these features, or a better approach to the example.

UPDATE: A reader (Connie Price) has graciously submitted a PDF that details how she used Advanced Actions in her project. Click here to view the PDF.Click here to view a source Cp demo file.