Buggy Behaviour of Buttons and Checkboxes in a Group

Jan 19, 2023

Articulate probably had some ideas when changing Group behaviour, but especially when using buttons, checkboxes and other UX elements in groups the behaviour Articulate had in mind fails. Maybe its even a bug.

https://360.articulate.com/review/content/d4e2610c-ef4d-4eca-84bc-97bed7c4a9f6/review
Check this sample of grouped and ungrouped UX elements and you will notice the difference immediately when hovering. All grouped elements react on hovering the group. That is for sure not what i want...when i want UX elements grouped i want them to act independently on a hover. If i need a group hover i add a hotspot.

Adding the Storyline so Articulate devs can test and fix this.

And just discovered by following some other posts that this behaviour is in Storyline for about 8 years. This cannot be intended ! Fix this !

18 Replies
Jose Tansengco

Hi Math,

Thanks for bringing this up! 

I can confirm that we are already tracking a known bug that causes the hover state of all objects in a group to activate even if the trigger only involves one object in the group.

I've added this community post to the report so we can notify you as soon as a fix is released. Thanks for your hard work on analyzing this behavior!

Joel O.

Hello,

I'll have to concur, this is really a strange behavior. Objects should keep their separate states when grouped. It is really strange to be forced to add a disabled state on all the elements so as to not having the whole group to show the hand cursor. 

It is really a pain when doing custom menus, which we do a lot, because of course we want to group our menus elements and of course we stumble every time on that bug :(

John Morgan

Hi Bart,

Thanks for checking in on this! I understand you are looking for an update on the bug where the whole group activates the hover state even if the trigger only involves one object in the group. There currently hasn't been any movement on this as we prioritize other fixes. I'm going to include your voice in the request. We’ll update this discussion when there is any news to share about this.

In the meantime, a workaround for the issue would be not to group objects together when using triggers or if one of the objects has states.

Math Notermans

Relying on a bug :-) :-) :-)

And you only would need to fix it if you republish it. Better not relying on it in new projects... oh wait... Articulate is not gonna change...or are they... clear example of problems caused by untransparant Articulate policy.  They promised change on transparancy...

Math Notermans

Articulate actually changes their internal code and HTML almost every update. If you only use 'default' options then indeed i agree it would be nice if updates never break existing projects. But that also limits Articulate to make newer versions completely backwards compatible and thus hang on indefinately to the old way Storyline is setup.

If you depend on Javascript code in your projects, you need to doublecheck projects every update Articulate makes... as the changes in updates are not documented good enough to ensure the way you use Javascript still works after updates. I try to make my code as simple as possible and document it thoroughly, so i can fix things quick when Articulate updates break things. Bonus of using Javascript this way, is that all code and tricks i make...i can reuse in any rapid authoringtool that supports Javascript. 

The 64 bit version could have been a great start with a modern Storyline. Alas they did clamp tight to the setup of the old version.