Showing link URL on Hover

Oct 05, 2021

Trillium Creative Solutions
By Trillium Creative Solutions

Ran into a snag today with hyperlinks in Storyline. Storyline doesn't let you right click a hyperlink to copy the url and it doesn't show the URL when you hover on a link, which is a normal browser behavior. My client recently asked me to make the url show on hover for all the links in the course. I used a hover state and added a textbox with the url to the bottom left of the slide, inside the hover state, so it would be in a similar position to the default browser behavior. That worked! YAY. For a while. Then all the links with hovers suddenly stopped working. Any link with a hover url stopped being a link. It was still a link inside Storyline in the triggers list. But clicking did nothing. Hover still shows the URL though... 

Removing the hover makes the link work again.

Is the url text blocking the link? 1. if it was it wouldn't have worked initially, 2. No. It's not. It's not even near it. 3. I set it to the back just in case. 4. Just tested adding a hover state with nothing in it and it broke the link. Removed the hover state and the link works again.

Help.

3 Replies
Matthew Malandro
over 2 years ago10/06/21 at 12:39 am (UTC)

Hello Trillium Creative Solutions,

I found this E-Learning Heroes discussion about hover links helpful. Phil proposes a valid work-around for this by creating a transparent shape over the text and adding the url into the hover state. The shape must be hidden at the start of the timeline and then reveal itself when hovered over.

I hope this information is helpful, best of luck!

Trillium Creative Solutions
over 2 years ago10/06/21 at 3:02 pm (UTC)

I had tried separating my links into their own text boxes, then adding my own hover trigger and then an open url trigger afterward to the textbox. Order matters. But as I was applying the last one, the .story corrupted. Tried to recover and failed. Went to a previous version and started again and corrupted much sooner.

I tried the above solution as well and by the 5th slide it is corrupted. Again.

Ren Gomez
over 2 years ago10/07/21 at 4:36 pm (UTC)

Hi Trillium,

Thanks for the follow-up, and I'm sorry to hear that! You may want to check your temporary files to see if there's a working version. Here's how to check: 

  1. Open this folder in Windows Explorer:  %appdata%\Articulate\Storyline 
  2. Scan the contents of this folder for a file that starts with the name of your project. If you find one, copy it to your desktop. If you find more than one, copy the latest version to your desktop. 
  3. Change the file extension of the copy on your desktop from *.tmp to *.story. 
  4. Double-click the file to open it in Storyline. 

Saving your file and assets locally is one of the best ways to avoid running into corrupt file errors. If you need further help with this, feel free to share your file with our support team using the link below, and they can lend a hand!

SUBMIT A CASE.
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