Launching external files

Thank you for responding again. The image is on the desktop computer; in fact, in an "images" folder, next to the folder where the Storyline project is. This is very strange because as I said, it did work for me at one time.

It seems like it's not a programming issue but a technical issue with Storyline. Why wouldn't it create the Extenal Files folder? Or, it does create the folder but it is empty, which is even stranger, why would it create it and not put anything in there?

Hi Guillermo,

Are you seeing the folder created and it's empty or it's not being created at all? You mentioned working locally, are you publishing locally as well as described here? If you're able to share the .story file here with the image you're trying to link, perhaps we could see if something is not linked correctly? 

Well, this is getting too complicated for me. First, let me say that I cheated and solved the problem, manually creating the External Files folder inside the story_content folder, and placed the image there, and it works. It works only when viewing it online, it does not work off my hard drive.

Second, the project belongs to an online course delivered in Desire2Learn. So, after publishing the project locally, I upload it, along with the html page where the it goes, to the server. By the way, when I say publish, I mean locally, I select the web option and save it to a folder in my hard drive, then zip it and upload it. Is that not the way to do it? I've been using that way for months and it works. I use an <iframe> tag within my html page.

Third, I noticed a warning in the tutorial you indicated, where it recommends to publish to a local hard drive, not a network drive. I wasn't doing that, I was publishing to a network drive, not my desktop computer's hard drive (that's what we are told to do). But I just tried publishing to the local hard drive and it does not work either.

Finally, I don't know what the .story file is, I don't see it. I see a story.html file and a story.swf file.

I forgot to answer the first question. The folder is not being created. But I have been successful before; that why I know about it and how I could cheat

Hello again. I did publish to my local hard drive again and made sure the project was locating the image, and it did work.

Thank you!!

Of course, sorry, I was focusing only in the output. I have no idea why it is so mportant to publish to a local drive, but in my case, it did solve the problem.

Hi Guillermo,

Working off a network, shared drive or USB is known to cause erratic behavior due to latency. You can see this documented here, and it's good practice to work on files and publish locally., You can always back up to a network or shared drive if needed. 

Storyline was not placing my linked PDF into the External Files folder when I published. I relocated the PDF into the "SAME" folder as my Storyline file -- republished --  then it worked.

Thanks @Nancy Woinoski for your suggestion resolution, which worked. However, I'm having an issue of when the linked pdf is closed my entire course is closed. How can I have the linked document display within the current browser window and allow users to close the document without closing the course?