List of read-only Storyline system variables

Oct 01, 2012

Hi, Storyline Experts -

Is there a list available of all the read-only Storyline variables?  I'm specifically interested in knowing whether there is one that holds the .story file-name or the course title. 

Mahalo plenty for your insights,

Jeff

9 Replies
Mr Petrichor

hello,

we are very interested in purchasing StoryLine for our DL projects, but we use a custom built LCMS.  we do not have any scorm or aicc hooks in our LCMS and rely on our own javascripting to talk to the database.  In Captivate we access the system variables and pass those values on.

I'm excited to see there's an SDK.  I'm sad to see I can't access system variables?  Is there another avenue for manually tracking progress, page number etc, in Storyline?  It seems this might be a show stopper for us.

Thanks in advance

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Mr Petrichor and welcome to Heroes! 

There is not an option to add Page numbers to Storyline, but you could do something similar by creating your own numeric variable  or a data entry variable that is adjusted by +1 on each new slide. You'd still have to write the javascripting to report the variables to your custom LMS, and you may want to review this method on how you could set up variables that are reported to an LMS.  

Mr Petrichor

Thank you very much for your response - I can see this would be useful as a method to send the current page out of Storyline as the user exits the webpage, via jQuery/javascript - good news!

how 'bout upon re-entering Storyline? If my homegrown LMS calls the course, is there a way I can pick off URL variables so that I can sent the user directly to the page they left off on?

Thanks!

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Mr. Petrichor,

You may want to look into the Resume data or suspend data element for when you publish a SCORM Course. It tells the learning management system (LMS) where you leave off when you exit the course. It lets you resume the course later in the same place without having to start over. Storyline has the ability to enable the Resume functionality, and then depending on how you've set up your custom LMS you'll need to consider the following:

  • If your LMS supports bookmarking, mark the box labeled When running in LMS, ignore Flash cookie. The LMS will control resume behavior in this scenario.
  • If your LMS does not support bookmarking, uncheck When running in LMS, ignore Flash cookie. The Flash cookie will control resume behavior in this scenario.
Mr Petrichor

Thanks again for the response - our LMS is homegrown, and doesn't support SCORM or AICC or TinCan (though I'm trying to wade through the TinCap documentation to see if we can incorporate something ...whew! it's .. something)  What we have done before with Captivate is use Javascript to call built in set and get functions where I can run my own jQuery update functions to talk to our database, and then set current page and things like - that's what I'm hoping exists in Storyline.

Anything like that?

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Yes, we have a number of users who set up Javascript triggers to talk to their own databases and you'll see that as a trigger option within Storyline to execute javascript. It's not something I'm equipped to assist with, but there are a number of community members who are great with Javascript. I'd suggest if you have some code started for what you'd like to do, to post that (maybe as a new thread) so that they can take  a look and weigh in. 

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