Any text in Text entry field

Mar 23, 2022

How do I make a text entry field something that the user can type anything and it accepts the entry? In other words, the TextEntry variable requires a value in order to recognize the action and I don't want it to require specific text, just any text they type.

The users will be prompted to type a specific thing but it's possible many users will mistype it - I'm okay with that since the objective is for them to type the note into their system. 

If I recall, SL3 had a condition where it could be any text. SL360 seems to be missing a lot of the conditions that I was used to working with. Am I remembering that correctly? At any rate, I need help doing a freeform text entry field without building a quiz slide.

3 Replies
Michelle White

Thank you. I was looking for a way to take an already built text field that requires a specific value (on an already produced and designed slide) and convert the text field to one that does not require a specific value... but I'll give all these steps a try.

Since this slide is not meant to be an assessment, I was hoping to avoid going through the work of making it a quiz-based slide. Also, it may be a challenge to copy/paste all of the elements onto the new free form slide and try to preserve all settings. If you know of another way that wouldn't require creating a quiz slide, I'd be grateful. Thank you.

Michelle White

Resolved: 

I got help from someone that is very experienced in advanced SL programming. And it's so much more simple the setting up a freeform quiz slide: 

Set <text entry variable name> equal to the typed value when Text Entry loses focus. (this is a default setting for the text entry variable)

and then a trigger which would alter based on the action you want, in my case, I wanted to show a layer when the user is finished typing, so it looks like this: 

Show layer <layer name> when <text entry variable name> changes. 

That's it. It worked. 

Additional tip: 

Put the text entry field to the bottom of the timeline if you want the cursor to already be there - it saves the user having to click on it. You may have to add your images to the slide master in order to be able to do this. (Layering won't work, this is the only way).