Setting an expiry date for published content

Hi Martin and welcome to Heroes! 

I haven't heard of this becoming a feature, or even one that is talked about here in the forums as a feature request, but you're welcome to submit one. I would suggest the best method to restrict users from accessing your content past a pre-determined date would be to host within an LMS or web server where you could restrict their access to a course.

Many thanks for your quick answer Ashley. It is a good suggestion but we have many clients who will be using the material in remote places and sometimes on board ships where internet connection may be poor or non-existing. Hence the need for CD or offline IPAD solutions. I'll submit a feature request.

Any other suggestions, that non-programmers may understand and use, still welcomed of course.

Ashley - I will definitely post it as a request, but I think this is something that you should definitely consider. We create courses for clients that host the courses on their own LMS. I do not have the ability to set the expiration date that way, so I need to be able to do it in the code. Lectora and Captivate both have this feature, and I am inclined to use these products until this is a feature for Storyline (although I would like to use Storyline more), as I cannot create a great product only to give it away forever because I can't expire it when a contract is up.

Hi Jay,

Thanks for sending in a feature request, and I can see where this feature would be used by a lot of users. There may be something you could include in a Javascript trigger at the beginning of the course to check the date - but I'm not equipped to help write those. There may be someone in the community who could assist. 

I've been working with Javascript more in Storyline and have also been programming date related events. If I get some spare time, I'll try and post up a solution.

Hi Ashley,

As we also deliver our software to remote areas I strongly agree with Jay and others that this feature would be very useful, if not essential. I love SL and use it a lot. But like Jay, I am forced to use Captivate if I want to set an expiry date. I already made this a feature request.

Thanks John for sending this in as a feature request, and I certainly understand the reasoning why this would be essential, so the more feature requests the better! 

Hi Ashley,

Ref to earlier request of Martin H. I wonder if somebody has found a way to work around setting an expiry date on a course after being downloaded on an iPad for offline viewing. It would be ever so helpful delivering content to clients in remote areas. The trick of Garth works fine but as it is in Java it won't work on the iPad. Any brilliant mind doing this in html5

Regards,

John

We just talked about needing this feature for materials that will be downloaded. I honestly assumed that this feature existed, so I'm scratching my head on how to create a work around that will allow me to do this. We would like to set expiration dates so that if someone needs to download the materials, then the materials will only work until the next revision date. Otherwise, we run the risk of having old versions of files circulating for years and years and years.

Any guidance on solving this would be greatly appreciated.

there are some errors in the story provided by Garth on date validation, when validating date you cannot simply compare each expire value (year, month and day) to actual one, while you must proceed first comparing year, then month, and finally day.

here is a story file that should work well.

I put 2 layers to display the result of validation on each one.

expire date is set in JS but you could also set it by system variable and retrieve those variable when executing the JS.