[Xerte] Incorporating Captivate movies in Xerte 1.7

[Mark.Siegrist at vertexinc.com]

I'm not familiar with Xerte at all as I have yet to start playing around
with it (but plan to in the future, hence why I'm subscribed to this list).
I am however quite familiar with Captivate and the one thing I wanted add
to this discussion is that the swf file that is generated by Captivate is a
different animal than a Flash-generated swf. I found this out the hard way
a while back when trying to wrap a Flash navigation system around
Captivate-generated swf's to control them. Before Captivate 2.0 the
built-in navigation controls that they provided were
horrific/unprofessional (they were like the 'custom kewl mp3 playa' skins
available at various places online : ). So I decided to create a Flash
container and nav buttons to control the Captivate swf's that way.

I have a blog post that details the different variables/methods that
control Captivate-generated swf's:

http://elearninglive.com/wordpress/?p=5

I'm not sure of any events it might fire. I'm sure you could poll it though
by checking against the rdinfoFrameCount and rdinfoCurrentFrame variables
to see whether the movie is ended or not.

Hope this helps.

mark
www.elearninglive.com



                                                                           
             "Paul Swanson"                                                
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                                       RE: [Xerte] Incorporating Captivate 
             10/04/2007 11:34          movies in Xerte 1.7                 
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Yes, onMovieComplete is being triggered correctly in 1.8. But as you
mentioned, the Captivate movie has multiple timelines, and it seems to be
firing the event off when the first timeline completes, which is at the end
of the first frame. So I still have that to work out. I'm just trying out
the various features of Xerte, so this is nothing urgent. We have been
using Authorware for eLearning, and I think Xerte will be the replacement.
We don't have Flash here, but we will be getting Captivate. I'm using the
trial version at the moment.

I'm not sure how Captivate calls javascript. The interface hides all that
from you. You just have an option to set what happens at the end of the
movie clip, and one of those is to execute some JS. This opens a window
where you type the JS in. I haven't used this yet, but I think I could use
it to send an HTTP request to communicate with a PHP script. I figured that
if I do a quiz in Captivate, I could use this to store the results in a
database, but it would be nice if Captivate could communicate directly with
Xerte. I think it is a matter of what Captivate allows you to do. If only
there was a script icon in Captivate like there is in Xerte ...

Cheers,

Paul