Forum Discussion
Is there a way to move/copy blocks to other lessons or sections?
Hey Articulate, though I find copying a lesson useful and am glad you did it, really, copying a block between courses is a much more common use case for me. Requirements below.
Use case:
There have been many, many times I want to pull elements of courses into new courses, but not entire lessons.
Issue 1: It is a lot of work to copy a lesson and delete everything out and build around it, especially if I've already started building a lesson and decide I want to incorporate a block I had in another course. In addition, if I decide, well, I'll just copy and paste the content from this block to the lesson I already started building, for blocks like labeled graphics, timelines, tab interactions, basically all of the common interactive blocks, this is a pain in the butt, repositioning all the markers, finding the images/media all over again if they're uploads and not link-based, etc. These simply aren't "copy and paste-able."
Workaround for Issue 1: Lots of time spent :( And perhaps more storage on your part, eh? With me having to upload the same files in multiple places? $$$ saver?
Proposed Solution for Issue 1: My assumption is you've already got code that's copying lessons you can use parts of, and presumably every block has an ID, so then it's a matter of just figuring out how to map the ui and your database to ask, "which lesson do you want this to go in?" or "create a new lesson with this block in it." The former of these asks will lead to the need for the solution for issue 2 below, as well. I know this means new code which is a lot heavier lifting, but it would make us rapid-devs so much rapid-er!
Issue 2: This also speaks to the difficulty of moving blocks around once you've got a lesson that's even more than five blocks or so long (please give us a reorder blocks option that is not one click at a time!).
Workaround for Issue 2: My workaround ends up just zooming so far out that the long blocks don't take as much scrolling to move.
Proposed Solution for Issue 2: It's sort of silly I can't drag and drop or just literally give them a number order.
Hi Lei,
Have you tried using block templates instead of copying lessons and deleting the extraneous content? It sounds like that would be a good solution for the first issue. Here's an article that explains how those work.
Thanks for the feedback on the difficulties you're having reordering blocks. Would you be up for logging a feature request to tell us more about how you'd like that to work?
In the meantime, if there’s anything else I can do to help, please let me know!
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