Rise package includes .swf files?

Oct 11, 2018

We are trying to figure out what to do with our catalog of wbt courses with regards to the upcoming end-of-life of the Flash plugin. We have thousands of zip packages produced by hundreds of people over many years. Often we don't know what tool or how the package was published.

We've started using some tools to look inside the zip package and examine the contents. 

I was surprised to see that Rise packages include a lot of swf files. Is that correct?

The major browsers will all be disabling and removing support for the Flash plugin by mid-2019, so I wonder what will happen to Rise content after that. Will future versions of Rise not include the (soon to be useless) .swf content?

7 Replies
R Rothrock

Thank you for confirming that. I think the "Rise" test publish I was provided was mislabeled and not Rise at all! However I do now have several confirmed Rise packages and am looking in the metadata.xml file and I do notice the following nodes

<technical>
    <format>text/html</format>
    <format>application/x-javascript</format>
    <format>application/x-shockwave-flash</format>
    <format>text/css</format>
    <location>indexAPI.html</location>

What does it mean that there is that x-shockwave-flash <format> in there? Is that for the possibility of someone embedding swf content? 

Katie Riggio

Appreciate you reaching back out, R.

Excellent question about the x-shockwave-flash format! I've started a support case with our Support Engineers to see if we can get some further insight on this topic. Keep your eyes out for an email shortly! They're rockstars at deciphering such information, and I'll follow along so I can share any needed updates here.

Out of curiosity, did you happen to find out from what application the published content had those .swf files? Head-scratcher moment there!

If you find that it is Rise, would you mind sending us that zipped export package as well by clicking here?

Katie Riggio

Happy to help and thanks for sending those files, R!

I saw you're working closely with my teammate, Anna. To share an update here, too: Although we do not explicitly use that node, it is part of the spec for the SCORM 1.2 / driver we use. It's included for compatibility with older systems, and is there for posterity since SCORM 1.2 is an older spec. 

Hope that helps!

Mercedes Rothwell
Katie Riggio

Happy to help and thanks for sending those files, R!

I saw you're working closely with my teammate, Anna. To share an update here, too: Although we do not explicitly use that node, it is part of the spec for the SCORM 1.2 / driver we use. It's included for compatibility with older systems, and is there for posterity since SCORM 1.2 is an older spec. 

Hope that helps!

Hi Katie,

I was seeing this still present in the courses I have exported from Rise and having upwards of 100 shockwave flash files. Are you certain that this is something in the background, and not something that will affect the deploy-ability of courses post December 31st?

Regards,

Mercedes Rothwell