February 13, 2020
Hyperlink workflows – part 2
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February 13, 2020
Hyperlink workflows – part 2
Lieve is a civil engineer (ir) and a professional musician. After years of teaching and research (project management/eLearning/instability) she is now a freelancer specializing in advanced Adobe Captivate as trainer and consultant. Her blog is popular with Captivate users worldwide. As an Adobe Community Expert and Adobe Education Leader, she has presented both online and offline. Since 2015 she is moderator on the Adobe forums and was named as Forum Legend (special category) in the Wall of Fame. In 2017 Adobe Captivate users voted for Lieve as a Top Content Experience Strategist.
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Intro

in this second post, you’ll find the detailed explanation for the two last use cases in the example project posted yesterday:

  • Close popup window (using multi-state object)
  • Forced View of popups, all need to be viewed before navigation button appears.

Close button

Normally it is not possible to add an interactive object to a state in a multi-state object. You cannot create a hyperlink neither. However it is possible to have the same hyperlink available in all states, with the same triggered action. On the Close Box – slide, The info multi-state object is a shape with 6 states. Here is a screenshot:

Just FYI, the second state (QSP) looks different in the Object State panel, but that is just a  glitch. It is exactly the same on the state. To create this multistate object you need to follow carefully this workflow:

  • Create the shape (Tx_Info is the label I used) with a close hyperlink (big X), which I aligned to the bottom, centered. That will become the Normal state. You need to choose a command, but will have to edit that command later on.
  • Go into the Object State panel and duplicate the state, the X hyperlink will be included in this second state.
  • Close the Object State panel and edit the hyperlink. It need to be ‘Change state of Tx_Info to Normal’.
  • Change the color of the X character to a color from the background, so that it will be invisible; if there is a Fill and/or a stroke, set Alpha and Stroke both to 0. The Normal state will now seem ‘invisible’.
  • Return to the Object State panel.
  • Select the second state, style the X hyoerlink to a visible color. Add the necessary text and/or background fill.  Double check by previewing if the hyperlink action is functional.
  • Duplicate the second state, and edit the text/fill
  • Continue the duplication until you have all needed states.

I have tried with Hide for the hyperlink, but had lot of issues, seemed not to be functional. That is the reason why I switched to an invisible Normal state.

In the ellipses you find more hyperlinks. They change the multi-state object to the appropriate state. Here is an example for the first category ‘QSP’:

Comparing with interactive objects

As far as I know this is the only way to have an action propagating to other states in a multi-state object. Shared actions are not possible nor are Visited States (although with a more complicated advanced action possible).

The action triggered by the hyperlink can be rather complicated. A not so complicated example follows

Forced View

Setup of the multi-state object is quite the same as in the previous slide. In this case the change of state is triggered by real ‘buttons’, which seemed logical with this content. That also allowed me to use a Shared action. To track the clicks, a user variable is needed for each of the buttons. The shared action is visible in these two screenshots:

The X hyperlink, which was propagated to all states, triggers an advanced action with two decisions. The Back to Menu button is hidden with the On Enter event of the slide, and made visible when all variables have been toggled to 1. That meant that they all have been clicked:

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