are hyperlinks to external_files hard coded????

May 27, 2015

Dear community, I have to work on a set of articulate storyline SCORM packages I did not develop where for some reason access to external_files is not working.

The issue was that although the filenames and the resource description in imsmanifest.xml did match, when the url was built, for some reason the name of the file would be altered with html codes like %20 for example. 

I tried the following solution. Open the imsmanifest file and rename the resources to have strings with no special characters whatsoever. I also renamed the pdf files in the external_files directory to match the string introduced in the imsmanifest file. Zipped the whole thing again, uploaded to moodle (two different moodle 2.8 platforms) and to my surprise the links remained unchanged.

Did a source find with dreamweaver in all XML and HTML and JS files in search for the string "pdf", it only pops up in imsmanifest.xml where the names have been changed.

At this point the only reasonable hypothesis is that the name of the file being used to build the URL is hard coded somewhere in the SWF files created by storyline. This is kind of crazy, but I guess there are reasons for it.

In any case, the modules do not work correctly, I do not have the source files and need to solve this problem.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

3 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Rodrigo,

Unfortunately I'm unable to assist with modifications to the published output, but I did want to pop in in regards to the %20 element you're seeing in the titles - I've seen that before when the original file name included a space, so instead of spaces I generally do leading caps so a file may look like:  ThisIsMyFilesName.doc or similar - you could also do underscores.

Hopefully someone in the community will be able to provide some additional ideas here in regards to changing the published output. 

Rodrigo Filgueira

Hi Ashley, thanks for answering. The changes you suggest have already been done. The file names have been changed, and the corresponding entries in imsmanifest.xml have also been changed.

These changes have nonetheless not been reflected by the module's behaviour. Then again, I need to understand if these links are hard coded when the module is produced or otherwise. 

This would help me explain why I will not be able to correct these modules unless I get my hands on the source.

best

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Rodrigo,

Since we don't support the modification of the published output, I don't have an answer regarding the hardcoded links. However, I suspect that you will need to link to the ultimate filenames within Storyline rather than linking to something else that you intends to change later on within the published output. 

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