Forum Discussion
Seekbar Locked After Course Completion Relaunch
I’m trying to confirm whether this is a known Storyline limitation/bug or if there is a supported workaround.
- On the learner’s first pass through the course, the seekbar should be locked so they cannot scrub ahead. When slide is complete, the seekbar should be unlocked.
- Once the course has been completed, the learner should be able to relaunch it later and freely scrub through previously viewed content.
Current Storyline setup:
- Player seekbar: Allow drag after completion
- Slide revisiting: tested Automatically Decide, Resume Saved State, and Reset to Initial State
- Tracking: Viewed 1 of 1 slides (SCORM Cloud confirms Completed)
- Resume behavior: Prompt to resume
- LMS publish: SCORM 2004
- Reporting: Completed/Incomplete
- Tested on Brave, Chrome, Firefox & Edge
Test course is only a single slide, so there is very little complexity involved but am getting reports that other courses for different clients on different LMS's are having the same issue.
What happens:
- Launch course in SCORM Cloud.
- Seekbar is correctly locked during initial playback.
- Let the slide play through completely.
- Course reports completion.
- Seekbar correctly becomes draggable during that same session.
- Exit the course.
- Relaunch and choose Resume.
- Seekbar is locked again.
I repeated this with all three slide revisit settings listed above on SCORM Cloud. The result is identical, so slide revisit behavior does not appear to affect the seekbar state.
At this point it appears that Storyline correctly changes the conditional seekbar state after completion during the active session, but does not persist that unlocked state across LMS sessions.
I’ve found several older forum discussions describing similar behavior, including JavaScript-based workarounds that read the LMS completion status and then alter navigation/player behavior. Before implementing something custom, I’d like to confirm:
- Is this currently considered expected behavior for Allow drag after completion?
- Is there a supported Storyline-only method to preserve the unlocked seekbar state after relaunch?
- If not, is JavaScript still the recommended workaround?
- Is there any official guidance for handling this across both SCORM 2004 and SCORM 1.2?
I’m specifically trying to avoid LMS-specific or vendor-specific hacks because this needs to be a repeatable standard across multiple developers and clients.
I can provide a copy of the Story file via PM upon request by an admin.
Many thanks,
Derek
1 Reply
You're not imagining it — this matches the widely reported behavior, and your testing rules out the usual suspects (revisit settings, browser, SCORM version). "Allow drag after completion" is a runtime event, not a persisted setting: the unlock fires when completion triggers during a session, and nothing about that unlocked state gets written anywhere that survives a relaunch. Resume restores your suspend data — variables, slide position — but the player's seekbar lock gets initialized from scratch, so you're locked again.
To your questions: 1) Expected, yes — I haven't seen official documentation calling it a limitation, but it's consistently reproducible, including in exactly your setup. 2) No Storyline-only method — there is no trigger action that locks or unlocks the seekbar, so triggers simply can't touch it. 3) JavaScript is still the only workaround I've seen, and it's DOM-level (toggling the seekbar element's interactivity, usually gated on a persisted "completed" variable). That means unsupported and potentially fragile across player updates — if you go that route, retest on every Storyline release.
One design-side alternative, since the course is a single slide: do you actually need the seekbar? Hiding it and using your own navigation removes the whole problem — no locked state to fight, and completion still reports normally. What's the real learner need for scrubbing on relaunch — reviewing content, or something else? That changes which workaround is worth the effort.
