Screenr: Using WebObjects to "carry on" lots of files

Thanks Steve! From someone who you helped deploy this method in real project, I must say it is by far the coolest and opens up so much in terms of how to manage external resources.

Any idea as to whether this approach would work when publishing to the Articulate App?

This is awesome Steve.

This sounds great.  Any idea why it's just not working for me?  I'm trying this out for the first time and my links, when published, just will not do anything.  I'm trying a button and hyperlink and have checked pop up blockers, tried different browsers.

thanks!

Hey Brian, 

Are you running the Flash output locally? The Flash Player Security settings will block interaction between the Flash Player and the browser by default. You can get around this by publishing to CD, uploading the published output to a Web server or by adding your publish / testing location to the Flash Player Security Settings Manager whitelist.

Once again, many thanks Steve for this useful tip !

Glad this helped you Pierre - he's definitely a superhero. ;-) 

Many thanks Steve. I would like to load an external javascript file with some javascript functions. Until now, after publishing I used to add that .js file to a new folder manually, then I overwrite also story.html file to add the <script src=""> tag with the link to that file, to load the script in the html page. Can I use this technique to load the .js file with some command, after publishing it into a WebObject folder?

Thanks

searching the forum I found the answer in this post by you :)

Unfortunately I must say that webObject is not practical. I need to update a js file containing some scripts, and if I change the content of the file linked by the webobject, the js file is not updated in the published folder, it seems somehow SL caches it...  this way it is useless...

I try to used the process for links on the resources tab and doesn't work :-(

do you know of a way to make it work on the resources tab?

Thanks,

Hi Adriana,

To use the Resource tab and any of the links methods such as described here you'll need to have the resource tab generated on at least one slide. That could be a dummy slide that the user never sees (remove any triggers to it). 

While linking in this way works, this doesn't resolve the issue of handing off files. If I create a Storyline course, and I hand the files off to the client, they would then have to publish that file, go find the path to where the linked documents are stored, and copy all the files in there by hand every single time they publish. This is not ideal. I have submitted a request to add a feature that Storyline gathers the files and publishes them with the course, it seems odd that this isn't a feature already. It's not just with handoff to clients, where I am, I may start a file, but someone else will work on it at some point, and they'd have to go through this process too. There really should be a way to hand off the storyline file to anyone, and have all the linked files go with it.

Hi Crystal, 

What version and update of Storyline are you using?

In Storyline 2 Update 11, we fixed issue where file attachments wouldn't be saved in the Storyline project file prior to publishing. That was for files in the resources tab - and if you include them there you can reference them as a part of the published output using the steps mentioned. 

You'll want to make sure that you are linking to local project files. You'll see that noted here within our best practices article. 

I'm using Storyline 2, but I'm not trying to use the built-in resources tab in the player, I'm trying to just link them with jump to url/file in the course itself. When I do them this way, it links to the relative path on my computer, so when I give the storyline file to another developer, none of the PDFs are there because they are still linking to somewhere local on my hard drive.

Hi Crystal, 

The files you're linking are only pulled into the .story file when you've enabled the Resource tab - so that's why you could use that workaround to include them in the file and then link to them on the slide without showing the resource tab on your project. 

I didn't realize that the resources could be turned off PER SLIDE in the story view, so now that we have got this working, I thought I would post what we did here so that anyone else who is looking for a solution will be able to find it.

1. In the Storyline file, I created all the course slides with their content, and any link in those slides had a jump to url/file trigger attached to them with the path to the file (PDF in my case) being "story_content/external_files/nameOfPdf.pdf" that I entered manually (not using the file picker).
2. In the course, I created a blank slide, and in the story view, I turned off the previous and next buttons so that the slide is in the course, but there is no reference to it.
3. In the story view, for every slide EXCEPT for the blank slide, in the Slide Properties panel under "player features", I selected "custom for the selected slides" and unchecked the resources. (This makes it so that the resources button never shows up in the player, except on the slide that is never seen).
4. I added all the PDF's that were used in the course to the resources menu in the player.
5. Published. All links work as they should and the PDF's are stored in the Storyline file so that I can hand it off to another developer.

Hope this helps!

Thanks Crystal - sorry that wasn't clearer in my original post about enabling the resource tab on only one slide! I appreciate your thorough write up here! 

Thanks Steve and Chrystal for detailed explanation. For my project, I have used web object because I need to include some java script, images inside an HTML file. Using Resources section is also helpful but I do need to show the resource section to the learner for other material and PDFs. I cannot hide the Resources.