Show/Hide Resources?

Hi Ryan,

You'd only be able to hide the whole tab, not individual resources within the tab. Instead of using the Resource tab, you could make a set of Lightbox slides which would allow for a bit more control, based on states - say once they've accessed a link, it's disabled . Here is a blog post on how to set up a lightbox slide for your Resources. 

Thanks, Ashley!  That just might work...

Happy to help Ryan, and good luck with your project! 

For Storyline 2 is there an easy way to show/hide these on the project? When my user reaches a certain slide, I want the information to be available on the player, but not until that point. 

Hi Jeff!

You can customize the properties for any slide in your course, including how it advances, what happens when learners revisit it, and which player controls are visible. See this tutorial for details.

Hi Leslie. This doesn't work for me. The custom slide properties only allow me to toggle built in features on or off. I initially wanted the Resources tab to populate with the documents throughout the course, but read this and found out the software is limited in that respect. My next idea was to use the lightbox as suggested in this thread, however, I am only able to enable/disable the links with variables and slide triggers....the custom item still displays in the upper right (or upper left if I selected that option). So there is no way to hide/show this it seems. 

Ah, you would be correct. Not sure if someone in the community has a solution for your custom design with that or not. I apologize for misunderstanding your question.

No worries-- I probably didn't explain it well enough. I really appreciate your help!

Wish I could have assisted more Jeff :)

Preface

So, since it's been 6 years since this original thread was started and Articulate still hasn't provided an option to show or hide documents in the Resources tab, I thought it might serve the community to reopen this thread--both to share our team's own workaround (which is labor-intensive and prone to causing future errors), as well as to remind Articulate that YOU GUYS REALLY SHOULD JUST MAKE IT POSSIBLE TO SHOW OR HIDE DOCUMENTS THAT ARE PERMANENTLY EMBEDDED IN THE COURSE RESOURCES (since the resources tab seems to be the only way to permanently embed files in an articulate course--either Storyline OR Presenter).

The Situation

We have hidden 'Clues' throughout some of our courses as part of a game for the participants.  They need to be able to print out these clues once they find them in the course, which means we need to attach a .pdf or .png of the 'Clue' slide so that they can easily do that without printing the whole classic player, browser window, etc.  Since they're supposed to be hidden, we can't include them in the Resources (because we have other non-hidden resources there that they need to be able to access at any time).

The Workaround

The alternative for embedding hidden files in Storyline is relatively simple compared to Presenter Studio: We hyperlink to a file as described in THIS ARTICLE.  Hyperlinking the file is pretty simple, BUT there's a big caveat, and that is that the course will only publish with the correct file linked as long as your file structure and computer environment don't change.  In other words, if I move that file later, or if years down the road a different employee needs to update the course and is working on a different system, they will have to remember to RE-choose that file in the hyperlink, otherwise the user will get a 404 type error when they click the link.

The alternative in Presenter Studio is much more cumbersome and has to be performed EVERY TIME that you republish the course--not just when you change computer environments: In this case, you add a hyperlink 'to a file', but instead of actually choosing a file, you specify the sub-directory in the future SCORM package where you will later add the file: e.g. "presentation_content\external_files\YOURFILE.pdf".  Then, after you publish, don't zip the files yet.  First, open up the 'presentation_content' folder and add your 'external_files' folder containing 'YOURFILE.pdf'.  Then you zip the main enclosing folder and you have your finished SCORM package that you can test in scorm cloud.

...This last solution seems to be working, but it sure is annoying having to re-insert the files every time.  Granted, the advantage of the Presenter solution is that once I have that link specified, I don't have to change it again as long as I re-add the file in the same place each time with the same name.

Anyone else have any better / easier solutions?

As Jonathan stated, this thread seems to have fallen of the radar. I'm looking for help on a similiar issue.

A client has requested that a document become available in the resource section only after the course is completed but ideally, they do want it available when revisiting the slides later. Meaning, if the learner comes back to the course, the resource section is open and available.

Seems like an easy ask but I've not been able to make this happen with just the standard functionality. Do I need to get into variables and triggers? Do they even work for a resource page?

Thanks!

Gillian

Hi Gillian:

I know you're looking for a better built-in option, but I have done something similar in the past using lightbox.

What I did was create a separate scene with my lightbox files available on separate slides. Next, I put a button on each slide with a trigger to lightbox a slide and adjusted the lightbox options as the user progressed through the training. My icon was a, "briefcase", and filled with the applicable documents as the user progressed through the course. So, once the user reached a certain point in the course, the button would allow access to the entire suite of files/documents. 

I'm not sure if that solves your issue, but that was a workaround I used. 

Sounds like a great idea - thanks Jeff! 

I came across this post as I am looking at a similar set up. We have some courses that will have several different scenes (one per language; the user would select the language from a drop-down on scene 1, then go to the scene with the correct translation of the course. Each scene would have attachments in that language. We do not want the people who choose Thai to see the document attachments in Portuguese. for example. Is there a way to accomplish this? 

Hello Jennifer!

Great question! If you're adding resources to the Resources tab in Storyline 360, all learners will have access to all resources. Instead of using the Resources tab, I'd recommend adding a layer with the resources associated with each language. I created a simple example in Storyline 360 and attached it to this reply.

Let me know if that would work for you!

Hi Jennifer,

I know you're looking for a better built-in option, but I have done something similar in the past using lightbox.

What I did was create a separate scene with my lightbox files available on separate slides. Next, I put a button on each slide with a trigger to lightbox a slide and adjusted the lightbox options as the user progressed through the training. My icon was a, "briefcase", and filled with the applicable documents as the user progressed through the course. So, once the user reached a certain point in the course, the button would allow access to the entire suite of files/documents.

So, you may want to create a new scene (such as lightbox slides) and have 1 slide for each language, then have the button lightbox Thai, or Portuguese respectively. If the button is located on each slide, then they can always pull them up and reference them, and hide them as needed. I had added several lightbox slides that changed the resources based on the, "evidence" that they collected, so as they progressed through the course, each lightbox slide would have additional resources-- all the evidence they collected on their mission.