help file .pdt not open and in exe Navigation to the webpage was..

May 10, 2013

Hello,

I am facing a serious issue with the "cd version"
output of a project that I published with Storyline.
The output itself works fine, but once I get it zipped
the decompressed project is no longer able to open
the attachments within it.

More specifically, these are the different behaviors:

- From the first output folder (still unzipped)
 - attachments work fine running Launch_Story.exe
 - attachments work fine running story.html from browser

- From the unzipped output folder
 - attachments work fine running Launch_Story.exe
 - attachments do not work at all running story.html from browser

Moreover, if I Directly create the. Zip archive using Storyline
right after the publishing, the Launch_Story.exe says Navigation to the webpage was Canceled (Annex problem1 and 2) and a folder appears "UNTITL ~ 1" .....

Can anyone help me in solving this?

:(

11 Replies
Christine Hendrickson

Hi Rosy,

If you're running the CD output locally, you'll want to run the EXE file you mentioned for the best results. If you launch the HTML file,  you'll run into restrictions similar to what you've seen. 

If you launch a local HTML file on your machine, you'll encounter browser restrictions that may cause issues with your course. This is usually pretty common with hyperlinks and documents or attachments you've included in your course.

Here's more information:

If you view published Storyline content on your local hard drive or send it to someone else to view on their local hard drive, you'll encounter security restrictions from the computer, web browser, Flash Player, and network that'll cause various features of your content to fail.
To properly test your published content and share it with others, upload it to the environment for which it was published. Please review the following article for details:
As the article states, you'll want to make sure you're launching the EXE file. If you plan on distributing your course on CD, it may be best to burn the course to a CD and test the CD itself. Do you have any trouble with the attachments after doing so?
Thanks!
rosy colelli

Thank you, Christine, you were clear about the ".exe" related issues... but what about the last problem I mentioned, that deals with the zipping process and the folder "UNTITL ~ 1" that appears?

The fact is, to add more, that when I create my .zip archive directly from Storyline then the ".exe" doesn't work anymore once decompressed.

Thanks for your help.

Christine Hendrickson

Hi Rosy and Alessandro,

Quick question:

Can you both confirm you're running the extracted EXE files from your local (C:) hard drive? 

If so, can either of you share one of the .STORY files? I'd like to try publishing, zipping and extracting the files on my side. Curious to see if I run into the same issue after extracting. 

Thanks!

Christine Hendrickson

Good morning Rosy! I hope you had a great weekend :)

Sorry for the delay in response, I was out of the office for the weekend.

Thank you very much for the file. I took a look, published for CD and zipped the course. After doing so, I tested the normal course output and the course ran fine.

I then extracted the zipped course and the files look the same, I don't see any additional folders after extracting to a new location. However, I do see the same behavior after launching EXE file. Although, launching the HTML file for the course here actually seems to work well. 

I manually zipped the course content and it works perfectly for me. So, if you're wanting to share the content in a ZIP file, instead of a CD, you may want to try zipping the course using a tool other than the built-in Storyline zip option. 

I'm curious, do you plan on distributing your courses and have them run locally on a user's machine? If not, I would really recommend burning the CD published output instead of zipping it. 

Thanks Rosy!

Christine Hendrickson

Hi Rosy,

Great timing, I was just about to post more information on this.

I've been looking around and it does look like this is an issue we're working on. 

From what I understand, when you zip using the Storyline zip tool, the INI file may be placed in the wrong folder. This may be why you're seeing those additional folders sometimes when publishing.

The current workarounds are to either manually zip the files, or copy the original "loader.ini" file from the course output and place it into the zipped folder. I've tested both with your course, so either of these two methods should work.

Let me know how it goes!

Thanks :)

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