Forum Discussion

JosephWilliams's avatar
JosephWilliams
Community Member
12 years ago

Reorder Storyline Scenes

I have a large Storyline course with about 15 scenes that are all out of order. I am aware that you can cut and paste scenes to reorder them, but this is just not practical as there are many branch...
storyline 360
PhilMayor's avatar
PhilMayor
Super Hero
3 years ago

Renumbering scenes is part of the storyline roadmap. Looks like it is top of the list.

ThorMelicher-b5's avatar
ThorMelicher-b5
Community Member
3 years ago

Good to see that this is on the Storyline roadmap.  I was thinking of adding the feature to my latest Storyline companion app I'm developing but for now I'm going to pass.

But with that pass, here's another way of re-arranging scenes - I'll let you decide if it's a better way for your situation. :)

  1. Set the scene you want as the Starting scene and then save your file.  Note the name of the scene (in my example I will have 4 scenes - Starting A, Scene D, Scene B, and Scene C.)
  2. Change the extension from .story to .zip and then extract the story.xml file (you'll find it in the \story folder)
  3. So it's easier to read, you'll want to paste the contents into an XML formatter page - https://jsonformatter.org/xml-formatter makes this easy (no uploading if you paste your content into the lefthand side)
  4. Search for your scene name.  

Once found, you'll be looking for something like this:

Notice in the highlighted text that the first tag is <scene> and the ending tag is </scene>

Looking through the screenshot, you'll see there are three additional scenes - Scene D, Scene B, and Scene C.  Move the scenes in the order you would like.  The second scene will become scene 2, the third will become scene 3 and so on. Just make sure to grab the text starting from <scene> all the way through </scene>,

I've re-arranged the example so the scene order is now Starting A, Scene B, Scene C, and Scene D:

Almost done -

  1. Take the newly updated text, copy it, and replace the contents that are in the story.xml file.
  2. Save the story.xml file and then replace the story.xml file in the .zip file
  3. Change the extension from .zip back to .story
  4. Open your course to see the newly sorted scenes

Some notes:

  • Always best to make a backup before doing something like this
  • As noted earlier in this thread, triggers will override presentation
  • You can't move the Starting scene with the way I explained this method  
  • You'll have to follow Walt's method above if you want the Starting Scene to be 1 if it was a different number to begin with