Forum Discussion
Storyline / SCORM: How can I check whether the cmi.suspend_data limit has been exceeded?
My question is: How can I check the amount of data stored in cmi.suspend_data for a Storyline course?
You can check the amount of data stored in cmi.suspend_data by adding a JavaScript snippet to your Storyline course and passing the result into a custom Storyline variable for display anywhere you want.
You can also log the suspend data and its length in the browser console using Developer Tools. As JudyNollet mentioned, the data itself is not human-readable because Storyline serializes and compresses bookmarking, variables, learner progress etc., into an encoded string.
However, you can measure its size using .length and display that value in Storyline. This is useful for monitoring how close you are to the SCORM 1.2 suspend data limit (~4096 characters). Once exceeded, bookmarking and resume functionality may stop working correctly. This is much less of an issue in SCORM 2004, which supports a significantly larger suspend data size.
In the example demo below, the course is published to SCORM 1.2. The JavaScript successfully detects the SCORM version and continuously retrieves the current cmi.suspend_data value and its length as the learner progresses through the course.
I also had an issue with this recently in a project that had thousands of variables. The quickest thing you can do to help is reduce the number of variables you have and also rename them with shorter names if possible as the variable name itself counts towards the suspend data limit.
With my project I've moved to a more JavaScript based solution that writes data to one variable that is holding data that used to be dealt with by lots of other variables. It did require a lot of re-working of the project but now I'm left with around 100 variables instead of thousands.