Resuming an articulate story

The data is compressed, the player uncompresses it and decides where to go this is not user editable.

There is no jump to slide API, you cannot jump into a slide

So what is this data?  Is it some kind of bookmark?  What am I supposed to store via the TinCan state API's /activities/state/?method=PUT, and when I get whatever comes back in /activities/state/?method=GET, what am I supposed to do with it?  How does that get the Articulate story to go to where we left off?

This is the resume data, are you building your own LMS I have no idea where you need to put it sorry

It didn't start out that way, but yes -- it looks like I'm building my own LMS, or at least trying to implement a lot of the Tin Can stuff myself.  I've implemented services for launching stories, and for storing and retrieving Tin Can statements, and all that's working fine.  I figured I would implement the state API, but there is no documentation on what the format of state data is, and especially, how you actually communicate with Articulate to get it to use the resume data.  I guess since I'm using an LMS, I wouldn't be dealing with Flash cookies. So all I have is this weird compressed data with no idea what to do with it.  I wish this were documented somewhere.

Hi Frank,

As Phil mentioned, suspend data is compressed to allow for more robust storage, the suspend_data string in an LMS debug log isn't human-readable. That is, you won't be able to decipher it. Since you're building your own LMS, I'm not sure this information will help, but figured I'd share here the information on an LMS and Flash cookies:

If you choose Always or Prompt, and if you'll be hosting your content in an LMS, do one of 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.

So I'm not sure what "if your LMS supports bookmarking" means.  Does that mean that the LMS has implemented the State API, and is dealing with this compressed resume data?   And if it doesn't support bookmarking, I assume that means the state API wasn't implemented, and we would use the Flash cookie so Flash would take care of it.

There seems to be no documentation on what the state API is supposed to return, and how to use this data to influence the Articulate player.

Hi Frank,

Yes, if the LMS supports bookmarking it is tracking the resume data itself. If it doesn't, the flash cookies will do this. That data is compressed, so I don't have information on what it's returning, but for more information about how it's handled within Storyline I wanted to point you to this kb article. 

Thanks

Happy to help Frank, and please let us know if you need anything else. 

Well -- since nobody knows how this data is compressed, and therefore what I should store and retrieve, it seems like it's impossible for me to implement the State API in my LMS, and I will just have to rely on the Flash cookies.  I suppose Rustici probably knows about this, but it seems weird that nobody documents it.  The spec talks about LMS's having to implement the State API, but they then make it impossible to do so.