PDF Publishable Certification Checklist

I would love this as well!

Ideally, you would do this using a survey tool, or your LMS may already have this capability. But if you want to do it within Storyline, I have prepared a .story file using Stephanie's example that demonstrates one way of doing so:

https://360.articulate.com/review/content/e25446f9-892b-4efd-8c04-fcfc6f6434f3/review 

Attached is the .story file and template PDF.

The JavaScript to generate the PDF uses the library documented here:
https://pdf-lib.js.org/docs/api/ 

Review John Cooper's post in this thread for moving variable values to a PDF using that library: https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/creating-downloadable-pdf-files-in-storyline-an-update-on-earlier-methods 

Unlike some other JavaScript with Storyline, the PDF generation will not work unless you put the published output on the web, such as your LMS or Articulate Review (that is, it won't run when published to your local drive).

The JavaScript executed via the button on the last slide of the .story communicates with a PDF form (created with Adobe Acrobat) with placeholders for variable values. After publishing, you need to put this PDF (attached to this message) alongside story.html. So for example, if you're going to test your project on Articulate Review, use the Publish > Review 360 > "Publish locally for manual upload" option and, after publishing, add the PDF to the zip that was created during the publishing process.

For a checklist with 200+ questions, you'll need to spend a lot of time creating the variables in Storyline, adding the triggers, and adding the lines in the Execute JavaScript trigger. You will also need to spend some time in Acrobat constructing the PDF with the corresponding variable placeholders.

Once you understand the demo .story file and JavaScript, as well as the PDF template, you should find this isn't all that difficult, but it will require a lot of labor if you have a lot of statements in your checklist.

Hope that gets you started!

Hi Rachel,

Each radio button set is assigned a unique variable (e.g., "RB01_3" refers to the radio buttons for the third statement in skill set 1). These variables are assigned a value of "0" by default (not selected), "1" if "Yes" is selected, and "2" if "No" is selected. 

Since these are variable values, they are all sent to the LMS automatically. However, depending on your LMS and it's custom reporting capabilities, you may or may not be able to generate a report with these values. 

There are examples in this forum of how to explicitly pass a variable value to the LMS by essentially creating a dummy quiz question with a Results slide added but that would be a lot of work if you have hundreds of Yes/No statements in your checklist.

Does the end user fill this out, is is it something that someone has to observe and complete?

At any rate, doing it in SL seems like a huge amount of unnecessary effort (including training users in how to use it), when (like Steve says) it can be done pretty quickly and easily with Survey Monkey, Google Forms, or even a spreadsheet. I mean, you can drive your fishing boat with an eggbeater if you work hard enough, but there are better tools. 

Hi Yvonne,

You should not need an 'else' statement in this case.

Be sure you have these two lines in your JavaScript:

const Box2a = form.getCheckBox('Box2a');
const Box2b = form.getCheckBox('Box2b');

Also, be sure there is indeed a checkbox labeled Box2a and and another labeled Box2b in your PDF form. But also be sure you have not accidentally named two fields in the form with the same name.

If you're able to share your JavaScript (the PDF form would be helpful too), I can probably troubleshoot this for you.