Over the last few weeks, I received a few reports that scores were not being saved in the LMS when using my template. Turned out to be a simple oversight on my part, which I have just fixed. Please download the latest version of scorm_support.js (v1.20120328) from GitHub.
Cause and effect
If you’re curious what happened, here’s a quick rundown:
When a SCORM course launches for the first time, the value of cmi.completion_status is "ab-initio". This means the course is a fresh launch with no prior completion attempts, and therefore no historical data in the LMS.
When Captivate launches, it requests a slew of information from the LMS via SCORM_API.GetValue. This includes the usual suspects, such as completion status, suspend data, location, score.raw, score.max, score.min, and score.scaled. However, if the course has never been launched before, suspend_data, location, and the score elements will all be empty (null). If the LMS follows the SCORM spec, it will throw the “element not initialized” error.
In my earlier work on the template, I decided to prevent these “element not initialized” errors by adding some logic to the template, preventing suspend_data, location, and the score elements from being checked when the course status is ab-initio. This was achieved via a regular expression:
if(entryStatus === "ab-initio" && /location|suspend_data|score/g.test(parameter)){
//prevent action
}
Unfortunately, I overlooked one important detail: when the Captivate course loads, it queries the LMS to see which SCORM fields are supported. This is done by requesting the “._children” CMI elements. For example, cmi.score._children will return the string “scaled,min,max,raw” indicating that cmi.score.scaled, cmi.score.min, cmi.score.max, and cmi.score.raw are supported by the LMS.
See any problems yet?
My regular expression was too broad, and prevented cmi.score._children from being queried, making Captivate believe that cmi.score was not supported. Since Captivate thought cmi.score was not supported, it did the right thing and stopped sending cmi.score data to the LMS.
The solution was to make the regular expression a bit more explicit:
if(entryStatus === "ab-initio" && /location|suspend_data|score\.(raw|min|max|scaled)/g.test(parameter)){
//prevent action
}
Instead of blocking any GetValue calls requesting “score” data when the course is ab-initio, we now only block GetValue calls that request specific CMI elements: score.raw, score.min, score.max, and score.scaled. Problem solved.
