Comments on: CaptivateController Updated to Support Setting Variable Values

By: philip

philip — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 23:08:39 +0000

@aj the API documentation doesn't really exist, I had to scrape the CP ActionScript for clues and do many weeks of testing to see what worked and what didn't. CP also has its own internal logic and rules, so it's quite possible that you can't proceed past your third slide because you've come up against a rule, such as no jumping past quiz slides. Unfortunately these rules are private and have not been publicized by Adobe. You'll have to deconstruct their code to figure it out. RE: nested functions, I like my style just fine, thank you. (My second comeback is "I just do what Crockford tells me!") As a commentor and the author both stated, prototype is really only helpful (from a performance point of view) if you'll be creating many instances of your object. CaptivateController will rarely have more than a couple. The CaptivateController source code is on GitHub if you'd like to fork and refactor.

By: AJ

AJ — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:34:38 +0000

Thanks for responding. That seems to make sense. Unfortunately the documentation for Captivate is so poor it is hard to find any information that might lead to a work around. In fact most Google searches I have done on Captivate come back with your site in the top 6-10 results. Do you know of any resources that might help one better understand the exposed Captivate API?

It seems that there must be some issue with the skin that I am using. I imagine that the Table of Contents interface also utilizes the same or similar method of changing slides. When I tried turning the TOC on it seemed to work fine for jumping back and fore from slides. In fact they seem to have some code in place to manage persistence. When you reload the page a dialog asks if you want to resume from where you left off. Unfortunately this feature only seems to work when the TOC is on.

On a separate note I came across this article a few months ago and thought it might be useful for you in doing some optimization with your CaptivateController script. http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/stop-nesting-functions-but-not-all-of-them/ I found the article very insightful.

By: philip

philip — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:31:19 +0000

@AJ and @ouija

Don’t know what to say; CaptivateController is simply using the API made available by Captivate. The behavior you describe sounds like a Captivate bug.

By: AJ

AJ — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:14:46 +0000

I am having a similar issue with gotoSlideAndPlay. It works OK for my first and second slides but nothing past that. When I try to go any further I can a gray background instead of the slide I am expecting. The timeline shows that I am in the correct place but there is not content. I thought maybe it was an issue with the SWF not being fully loaded but I have the pre-loading option in captivate set to 100% and I am working on a local machine so it should load almost instantaneously. Any help you might be able to provide would be great.

By: ouija

ouija — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:36:51 +0000

My fouth slide is a fill-in-the-blank… thought that might have something to do with it, but I replaced it with a multiple choice and still having issues… Thought it was Javascript that I was running on Slide entry, but the first 3 slides have the same javascript… Thought maybe it was because the swf wasn’t fully loaded (as I am calling the function on my page load) but even with a timer or using an href tag it still won’t go past the fourth slide (with the fill in the blank, which is required to have input). However, when you go to the slide normally, enter in something and continue to the next slide, THEN use the href link it will display the slide (but it’s really messed up looking)… Will test some more tomorrow but need to get some sleep.

Any help is appreciated!

can’t seem to figure out what the issue is.