Storyline suspend data and SCORM 1.2 - uncompressed data in the bookmark
Apr 24, 2019
While investigating why a course was resuming to the wrong slide using SCORM 1.2, I realized the suspend data was being truncated because it was too long. Once the data was over around 4000 characters (the spec says 4096), it gets cut off, which breaks resume functionality.
So, I looked at the bookmark more closely in the debug logs. Most of the data is encoded but there are some words in there too:
_default_Disabledr7a000111^h_default_DisabledA7a030131^q_default_Selected_Disabledr7a000111^h
Those words are object state names. On a slide with multi-state objects that is set to Resume Saved State, the names of the states are put into suspend data. Imagine a 15 question quiz each with 5 radio buttons and the bookmark breaks easily.
Given that the rest of the bookmark is encoded, I think this is a bug that essentially breaks any usage of SCORM 1.2 in all but the smallest courses. Can these names please be encoded like the rest of the suspend data?
2 Replies
Hi there, Sublime Media! It is expected that you might see some human-readable elements in your suspend data. Storyline compresses everything it can, but it must leave some items uncompressed. If you're hitting a data limit in your LMS with SCORM 1.2, can you instead use SCORM 2004 3rd or 4th edition?
That was our first solution as well, but this particular LMS seems to support 2nd edition (which has the same limitations as 1.2 - we're still digging to see if it can do 3rd or 4th).
The reason I posted was that things like variable names aren't stored in plain text, they are encoded and compressed. And given that the built in button states are always named the same thing, it would make sense to encode and compress as well. Even with custom button states, there are many javascript-based data compression algorithms that would avoid this problem altogether on SCORM 1.2. The only way around this problem on 1.2 is to set these pages not to resume, which is a worse user experience especially in a quiz review mode.
This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.