Aggregating Story Files for Single Project
Jan 19, 2013
By
Helen Jones
I am developing a very large project, where each scene, because it is full of video clips and interactivity and thus huge in size, is saved as a separte Story file. In total, there will be about seven of these "modules" that make up the full course. I understand that Captivate has an "aggregator" product that allows this type of development and then pulls or collects all the files and packages them together.
Does Storyline/Articulate have such a tool? If not, what does anyone recommend to manage this type of course?
And can there be one file that is essentially the "menu," where instead of branching to a scene within the file, actually opens a different story file?
Thanks so very much!!!
Helen
14 Replies
Hi,
There's no Aggregator as such, but you can just do Slide > Import > Articulate and bring each .story into a new Scene.
Not sure the "Menu to open different .story files" is an option - may be a clever way to do it, but not out of the box.
Bruce
Bruce,
I have a similar problem and wonder if someone can guide me. I have a menu and want to link in different story .story file.
Said differently, I have six lessons I want to be able to click on a button to get to. I've tried to put them all in one folder to create a path to link them but the url isn't working.
Can someone guide me on how to do this?
Sue, thanks for making what I wanted better said! That's what I want too! I plan to host my program in Articulate Online and I don't know if the participants just coming back to the source of the files is enough, but a cleaner, "menu" type approach would be best. They won't recieve a "certificate of compeltion" until we are able to verify all modules are complete.
Bruce, what can Storyline do along those lines?
I have the same situation in Storyline that Helen does. Because of the size of each module I don't want to create one huge Storyline file. I want to link 13 Storyline "modules" to a single menu. More manageable that way, if it can be done.
Hey guys,
If you're using an LMS (like Helen with Articulate Online), you can use this method to simulate course sequencing. That mentions Articulate Online, but it should work with most LMS.
Good luck
I had to solve this problem as well - I started with one huge file, but Storyline started freezing when I tried to save it. I ended up making a separate Story file for each tutorial, and making one big menu Story that called each of them. I experimented with web objects for awhile, so I could use the Menu feature in Storyline. Unfortunately, you cannot use relative links with web objects (instead of jumping to "http://www.alwaysthisurl.com/xyz.html", I needed to tell Storyline to look in the same folder as wherever the current story file is for a file named "xyz.html"). This was a dealbreaker (we don't have an LMS), so I had to start over again!
I ended up using the Jump to URL/File trigger, which DOES allow for relative links. Then I put all my output folders into one megafolder and gave that to our tech guys. For example:
Overall folder name: Storyline_Components
in this folder are the following sub-folders, straight from Storyline publishing:
My Menu output
Tutorial A output
Tutorial B ouput
Tutorial C output
Within the My Menu story, I have buttons for each tutorial that use Jump to URL/File triggers. They use links like this: ..//Tutorial%20A%20output/story.html
The two periods and backslashes are the relative part. If you know where your files will always be hosted, you can go ahead and put the full URLs.
I hope that helps - it took me a LONG time to work out this solution!
P.S. - My method opens a new browser window for each tutorial (otherwise, i ended up with nested players!). I made this a 'feature' instead of a 'bug' in that users can have multiple tutorials up in different windows at the same time if they like.
Awesome sauce! Thank you (and thank you too, Rebecca for your solution) - I can guess it is actually a bit easier in Storyline since you just pick a quizzing slide to kick off the module. I think this will work well. I haven't use Artiuclate Online yet, but I'm suspecting that from the administrative side, there is a way to see who has completed all and thus manage the course wrap up.
Hi Rebecca,
I tried a test file with your suggestion. When the new browser opens I get an error message back-any chance you can advise me on what to try next?
Also I noticed that the url has more back slashes in it--when I try to edit them out-articulate puts them back in.
Any thoughts?
Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0)
Timestamp: Wed, 1 May 2013 22:25:40 UTC
Message: Invalid character
Line: 1
Char: 1
Code: 0
URI: file:///C:/Users/suecze/Desktop/Testbutton/menutest%20output/story_content/external_files/story_content/story.js
Message: Object expected
Line: 162
Char: 2
Code: 0
URI: file:///C:/Users/suecze/Desktop/Testbutton/menutest%20output/story_content/external_files/story.html
After much playing around and a little help from my friend, I figured out what I was doing wrong so I want to share it. It was similar to what Rebecca said with a bit of a twist. When I published the main .story file, I had to nest my .story files into the main .story file.
Said differently, I had to publish the main movie, and drage and drop the linked movie folder into the main movie folder. I made a picture of it (below).
The issue with the error message above was a path issue. I found if I edited the trigger using the insert menu, I was able to type it in, instead of using the browse function and it kept out all the extra /// .
Sorry I missed your replies, Sue! I wanted to add that there may have been an issue with your test files being local (on your desktop). I've had a lot of errors when testing links to files on my hard drive. I had to upload them to a server to get them to work. Just a thought for anyone who visits this thread later!
Hi Rebecca,
Thanks for chiming back in, and we always recommend testing the published content within the intended publish environment. There are some web servers included below that you could use as a testing platform:
The link above was super helpful but it uses Presenter and Quizmaker. Is there a link like the one above for Storyline 360?
Hi Michele!
I'm happy to step in and help! Since this post is dated I want to make sure I'm providing the most up-to-date details!
We don't have an updated version of this tutorial so I'll describe a few workarounds for Storyline 360.
The initial question was:
How can you simulate course sequencing?
Here's what I'd suggest:
I'd love to hear other ways the community has created a similar interaction in Storyline 360! Keep us posted on what works for you, Michele!
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