Forum Discussion
Adding a text box for user input in Rise360
I would like see a text entry added natively to Rise. I am not going to hold my breath.
In a previous course I tried using an iframe embed and made a HTML page that can store the value in local storage.
https://frumbert.github.io/public/reflective_activity.html?source=mybucket
To get different values showing up I would then send in a 'source' parameter so that each text entry could be unique.
I would then have to modify the exported Rise package in order to embed the iframe source file into the Rise package (so that it could run on an intranet without internet access). I made myself a tool for re-packing externally referenced files into Rise:
https://www.frumbert.org/risefix/index.php
In my next project that required text entries the client required that the learner enter a value before Rise would let them navigate. I hadn't been able to get that working properly with my iframe based solution. I had reversed engineered the Rise player enough to see how other interactions work to set a complete flag so that the Continue button would then become active, and emulated that in my own code. But it doesn't work on iframes, so that prevented me from implementing anything there.
I now need learners to be able to write into a text entry and then, later in the course, have these entries show up again somehow. During output of the values, I'd like it to pop up or being something printable, since Rise doesn't save the value from a Storyline file. I had wanted to see if I could hook into the SCORM player of the Rise package and store a value there somehow, but cross-frame scripting gets in the way (and even after published when the package is in the same domain, the code didn't work).
So I'm stuck with Storyline, since when a Storyline file completes, Rise will see that completion and release the Continue button.
Here is as far as I am right now, and I've attached the storyline files that are loading for reference on that side.
https://360.articulate.com/review/content/1770286b-a109-49b1-95ce-a34e61e662fc/review
This reveals a couple of bugs in Storyline:
- You don't get scrollbars on text entry forms. So if the text is long, you might not know you have to click in it, then scroll using the mouse wheel / tap-drag.
- Depending on the font, the text crops on the last line of the text entry field and you have to know to press Enter afterwards so you can see what you typed.
The other thing it reveals is that Rise will re-use the same Storyline instance if you add it multiple times. This might be an efficient programming thing, but it sure is annoying when I want to add multiple text entries. I have to publish the same Storyline file multiple times to Review 360 for each text entry I want in the course.
On the summary page, I have a loader which is looking at my local storage and concatenating each entry into the text field. This is far from ideal - mainly because of the scrollbar bug.
I tried using a TextBox in Storyline too, but it doesn't have a variable and you can't set its value at runtime. This would have been great since you can add a TextBox to a Scrolling Panel to get the scrollbars showing up. But you can't add a TextEntry field to a Scrolling Pane (or at least I couldn't get mine in one). Executing javascript on form load could pop a window (if the user allows it) or throw up a PDF like in the previous users example - I haven't got that far myself yet.
I hope some other developers/creatives can chip-in with Text Entries in Rise and offer their own examples, because I don't think Articulate are ever going to add native Text Entry support to Rise.
Hi Tim, could you tell us how the export button is built? Do you have an example .SL file?