[Xerte] Attn.: Johnathan Kemp; RE: Page Wizards

[johnathan.kemp at ntlworld.com]

Hello,

To add a graphic to a page you use the page wizard's wizard. So you should not need to concern yourself with the pages icon structure at all. You certainly should not be adding your own graphic icons to the pages structure unless you know what you are doing and are seeking to change the way the wizard operates.

1. Select the Interface icon.
2. Select Templates / c) Navigators / Button Navigation
3. Create a folder for the new pages files to be saved in
4. Open the wizard by double clicking on the new button navigation page icon twice.
5. When the wizard opens select the buttonNav icon underneath the learning object in the left column. This will display the first form which is used to set values for the overall page.
6. Click on "New Nested Page" to add a new child "page" to the button navigation page  i.e. a panel which is accessed by clicking on the associated button.
7. These "pages" have their own form. This includes an optional property image which is used to add a picture to that "page". Use the image property to select an image file. The image will be downloaded to the projects media folder and displayed on that buttons "page".

With respect to the size of files when packageing for scorm. The way page wizards work each page gets its own set of files i.e. an rlm file (the model file that defines the icon strucure, an xlm file that stores the data for the page and an xwd file that defines the wizard for the page. These are saved in the folder you create for that page. Any swf files used by the wizard are saved in the projects "common" folder so this avoids duplication as several pages can share the same swf.

In general the size of the rml, xwd and xml files are small so they should not result in a significantly larger project than if page wizards were not being used. However if you want to reduce the file size you may be able to remove some of the files from each wizard based pages folder - I haven't tested this but believe it should work.

1. The rlm files should be safe to delete as they are used to create the initial icon structure for the page in the main project file. So once the page has been created the rlm file in the pages local folder should be redundant.
2. If you have no further intention to edit the project you could try deleting the xwd file as this is only used to provide the wizard.
3. The xml file is critical and cannot be deleted.

However again I would stress. The size of these files is not huge and the inconvenience of deleting them, particularly if you want to retain editing capability probably exceeds any benefit you might gain. You will get far better reductions of file size if you take steps to optimise all the graphic files that you use.

Kind regards

Johnathan



---- S Balachandran <sbciim73 at gmail.com> wrote: 
> Hi Johnathan
> 
> I got inducted to Xerte a few days ago & stumbled upon your Page Wizards PDF
> tutorial. Great stuff!
> 
> Just a couple of questions:
> (i) Tried to add a graphic to one of the linked pages in Button Navigation
> Page:  LO -> Interface -> buttonNav -> tabInteraction -> protoCentreButton
> -> graphic. Graphic appears, but the tab links have moved to the right -
> outside the pane - & the first link disappeared. Tab links don't function
> any more on clicking. Am I doing something basically wrong?
> (ii) Any resource URL on "what are the minimum files required to be packaged
> for SCORM?", since presently every file in the Project folder is packaged -
> making the SCORM Zip file size unnecessarily big.
> 
> Thanks in anticipation & regards.
> 
> bala
> (S.Balachandran)