[Xerte] Re: xerte XOT HTML5 - graphical menu, connector pages

Smith, John J.J.Smith at gcu.ac.uk
Thu Nov 7 11:15:41 GMT 2013


Hi,

As Julian says, all the presentation can be done in the attached html file. And to address the other items:

As Jonathan states Unique IDs are generated for each page as they are generated but these linkIDs remain with the page for its lifetime and can only be changed by editing the xml (from what I've seen)... They all look like PGxxxxxxx where xxxxxx is numeric

Then you have the pageID (this is an optional property that can be added to every page). This can be set to any key you wish (should probably avoid spaces etc that get mangled in urls... so you can set it as Pg5Sec1

Then you also have deeplinking already available... any URL play.php?template_id=1 can be changed to use either page/pageID/linkID to deeplink to that page - thus play.php?template_id=14&pageID=Pg5Sec1 will go directly to that page...

You can also use internal PageLinks to jump to specific pages, so not requiring the whole LO to refresh...

The only bit that I see that might be 'difficult' is the database connection. At present there is no way to do something when a page is left, so when a section ends you cannot trigger some code to do something else... the actual communication to the db is probably trivial via a custom php page but it needs triggering to know when to write data back...

I plan to rewrite the HTML5 engine into more of an OO model and Tom has requested some events to support SCORM and possibly TinCan later but I can see that you might also need some custom events to be fired at the end of a sections...

So for example you have a section called Section1 and page_end events are fired when each page is left. You could listen for a page_end event and pass the IDs/page number into the event handler and from there make a decision as to whether it was a section, subsection etc...

I'm happy to work those events also into the rewrite (although it won't be until Christmas period) and that should pretty much allow you to do what you want....

Regards,

John Smith
Learning Technologist
School of Health & Life Sciences
Glasgow Caledonian University

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2013 10:36 AM
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: [Xerte] Re: xerte XOT HTML5 - graphical menu, connector pages

Well, when you load up the html page, you have all the HTML / javascript / css you need to do that. You have a problem that is going to need some programming to resolve, one way or another,

From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of KnowledgeWare
Sent: 07 November 2013 02:33
To: 'Xerte discussion list'
Subject: [Xerte] Re: xerte XOT HTML5 - graphical menu, connector pages

If possible I'd like to get to a parts/modules menu as below (in blue). This is xerte desktop with a flash menu inserted (thanks Julian/Dave). John by dbase reading I mean the ability to read/write/update a proprietary (non scorm, my own) database. For example, the parts and modules in the blue menu below are loaded from the database. At the end of a module I want to update the database, when all modules in a part done update the part in the database, etc.

[cid:image001.jpg at 01CEDBAA.B1F74A60]

The menu below (black) is in Authorware, it's just a 'parts' module and the sections are linear. It's workable and probably much easier to do in XOT than parts/modules. For this I need to 'insert' the menu, read the 'parts' from the database when the LO starts, turn on checkmarks if the student has completed the part, then jump to the first page for each part when clicked, page through linear, and at the last page in the part update the database and return to this menu.

[cid:image002.jpg at 01CEDBAA.B1F74A60]

In the blue menu I coded the xerte icons with a specific ID which then gets parsed to build the menu/parts. For example the page ID for part 1 is 'p1id', and for the modules inside it is 'p1m1id', 'p1m2id' etc. It would be very useful if XOT had a way to uniquely code each icon but I don't think it does, or as Jonathan stated it does but it may change at runtime:

"If I remember correctly XOT assigns a unique identifier to each page automatically.
You can use this by using the pagelink feature available in all text boxes. However I think the assigned identifier changes each time you run the project. What is constant is the page name this maps to which is what is displayed in the pagelink control."
If a client builds a course they'd need some simple method of identifying a page that wouldn't change, that would always remain the same in order that the menu works. The page name wouldn't be good and it may be changed.

There's another reason I'd like a unique page identifier - I'm wondering if I could send a student an email with a link with his login/password and a set of pages somewhere in the piece to navigate to. For instance, on login it would go to the part 3 summary pages, page through them, do the part 3 quiz, then go to an exit screen.

That's really what I'd like to try to accomplish, some type of a menu like above that my clients are used to, and if possible a way to jump into a piece and navigate through a specific set of pages.

Are these things doable in HTML5 XOT? As many of you know I'm not in the same league with many of you as a programmer so please bear that in mind if replying, things like JSON etc. are beyond me at this point. If there is a way to do this however I will work toward it.

Thanks
RonM2



From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2013 1:49 AM
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: [Xerte] Re: xerte XOT HTML5 - graphical menu, connector pages

You do it using media -> flash movie, and set an init object, then load an .html file instead of a swf (the init object is what trips the code to display this rather than the swf, so you need to sety one, even if just a dummy - it also allows you to pass json into the html page for you to use in the content):



Then you get your custom content loaded up:





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