Forum Discussion
Corrupted triggers?
I've spent about 2-2.5 weeks working on this Storyline course. It's all storyboarded out, literally everything is good to go. We were out for snow recently so I spent DAYS working on this.
Then, all of my button/icon/image triggers were all fine. I came to work on it today after about a week's break and realize this new issue.
For example, I have 3 buttons on a slide. Each button goes to a different new slide for branching feedback. I can select button 1, set its trigger. Select button 2, and Storyline will jump back to the first button and select it and its trigger. So I end up with the trigger destinations being the same for both buttons. I have tried...
- deleting them and rebuilding them from scratch, no copying and pasting
- locking/unlocking them in the timeline as I set triggers
- letting it set its own triggers and then setting mine and then going back to delete the ones I don't want
- making a "test" slide with "test buttons" - same result
- going back to inspect my old buttons from my first few slides - it's infected them too
I've been running through the issue with ChatGPT and Gemini and both say that the file is corrupted and I need to start over. I still have over a month left on my trial but that makes me feel infuriated. I have a ticket into Articulate but I don't foresee them helping.
Is there anything I can do to save this? I thought the issue was duplicating slides but it goes all the way back to my original first slides that I haven't touched in weeks.
12 Replies
Is it possible for you to share a the file or part of the file. You can strip out any private info and just share the bare bones of the slides in question so we can see what is happening. It could be a corrupted file. Just a note that the most common cause of corrupted files is not working from a local drive.
Which scene or slide are you having the problem on?
I am working from a local drive. It gets saved manually by me to, technically, both my Windows and Mac desktops since I emulate.
Without seeing the file it is a stab in the dark, it is unlikely it is corrupted and more likely just an error in the execution
Corrupt files aren't usually readable by the host application, so the fact that you're still working in the story and saving it argues strongly against corruption. Anyhow, just one slide would be helpful for the rest of us to see. I've done branching as well but I haven't seen this.
I created an AI agent that knows the .story schema and so it can read and diagnose issues and fix them. Here is what it says about what happened. Contact me directly if this seems like what may have happened.
Root Cause: Corrupted copiedG References in Trigger Definitions
The .story file has corrupted trigger-to-object associations throughout every slide. The copiedG attribute in triggers
(which tells Storyline which object owns the trigger) points to the wrong objects.
Evidence from slide5.xml (Question 1):
┌───────┬────────┬─────────────┬──────┬─────┐
│ Button # │ Button GUID │ Trigger's copiedG │ Points To │ Status │
├──────┼─────────┼─────────────┼──────┼─────┤
│ 1 │ 4506f0ca... │ 4506f0ca... │ Same button │ ✓ OK │
├─┼── ──────┼─────────┼─────────┼─────┤
│ 2 │ 978c5bda... │ 26fd53cd... │ Button #7 │ CORRUPT │
├─┼─────────┼────────┼───────┼────────┤
│ 8 │ 4b89ae13... │ 80c1a12b... │ Button #13 │ CORRUPT │
├─┼─────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤
│ 14 │ 0231e07c... │ 966171b4... │ The SLIDE itself! │ CORRUPT │
└──┴────────┴────────┴────────────┴───────┘
What This Means
When the user clicks on Button 2 to edit its trigger:
1. Storyline reads the trigger's copiedG attribute
2. It finds 26fd53cd... (Button #7's ID)
3. It jumps to select Button #7 instead of Button #2
4. The user ends up editing Button #7's trigger, not Button #2's
Scope of Corruption
All 10 slides are affected with similar mismatches:
- slide.xml - 3 mismatches
- slide2.xml - 3 mismatches
- slide3.xml - 2 mismatches
- slide4.xml - 2 mismatches
- slide5.xml - 6 mismatches
- slide6.xml - 2 mismatches
- slide7.xml - 2 mismatches
- slide8.xml - 2 mismatches
- slide9.xml - 3 mismatches
- slidea.xml - 3 mismatches
Likely Causes
1. Copy/paste corruption - Copying objects with triggers may have failed to update the copiedG references
2. Storyline bug - A save operation or undo/redo cycle corrupted the GUID references
3. File format version mismatch - Opening in a different Storyline version may have introduced the corruption
brian@actyra.com
I haven't been able to find the bug. Looking at the course, it looks good. I don't think you need the extra slides for the branching. Those slides are feedback, so you could more easily do it as a layer.
Tell me if this screenshot and description of the actual bug makes sense.
https://community.articulate.com/discussions/discuss/corrupted-triggers/1249322/replies/1249490
