Save and Load Data Widget for Adobe Captivate

[Updated October 1st, 2011 to version2.]

The Save and Load Data Widget allows you to transfer data between individual and separate Adobe Captivate projects.

This is extremely useful when building courses and will allow you to make your Adobe Captivate project much more interactive for the user.

You can transfer any type of data from one Captivate project to another Captivate project as long as it is contained in a variable in Captivate. You can transfer data from Adobe Captivate System Variables or you can transfer data from Adobe Captivate User Defined variables.

This gives you more or less endless possibilities to extend your project with some new features.

A couple of example uses are:

Create a menu project in Adobe Captivate that launches your individual chapters. By using this widget you are able to carry over data from the individual chapters and display them on your main menu. You could for example transfer the status of each chapter and display “Completed” , “In progress”,  ”Not attempted” on your main menu. If you have quizzes you could display the Quiz Status (passed / failed) on your menu or even copy display the score percentage for each of the quizzes in your menu.

Another example could be to have an indication of how many modules are completed in each of your chapters. Using these widgets you can save and load the status of each chapter and display that in a user friendly way.

A third example: You can have the user enter a statement or answer in a Text Entry Box in chapter 01. Then in Chapter 03 you can bring up that same statement again by using these widgets.

How does the widget work:

There are two separate widgets needed. One widget will save the data you define and one widget will load the data again. Each set of widgets will allow you to save / load 10 variables. You can use multiple instances of these widgets to allow the transfer of more variables.

The widget stores the data on the users computer in a Local Shared Object (a Flash cookie). This data is then retrieved again by the Load Data widget and is copied to a user defined Captivate variable so you can use it in your project again.

The Save and Load Data Widget requires a minimum of two parameters:

The first parameter is the name of the object that you want to save on the users computer. The second parameter is the name of the variable that you want to save. If you need to save more than one variable you simply fill out another slot in the Widget Properties.

Extending the widgets functionality:

The two Save and Load Data widgets will work perfectly well as stand-alone components. However, in some cases there might be a need to tie the data together with a specific user. This will be the case if your users are accessing your content on a shared computer with a shared login. In order to make sure that your project will work in these cases you need to tie the data together with the users name or user id.

You can use the Save and Load Username widgets for that purpose. If you use these widgets in the same project the the Save and Load Data widgets will detect this and use that information to store the data for each individual user. This happens automatically so there will be no need for you to do anything further other than setting up the Save and Load Username widgets in your project.

The Save and Load Username Widget for Adobe Captivate is provided for free if you purchase the Save and Load Data Widget.

Requirements:

Adobe Captivate 6.0, Adobe Captivate 6.0.1.240, Adobe Captivate 5.5, Adobe Captivate 5 or Adobe Captivate 4 (AS3)

I do not know if this widget works with the Adobe Captivate 6.1 for subscription users!

Limitations:

Not really suited for projects using the standard Captivate TOC or “LMS” bookmark feature as you cannot be sure that the slide with the load data widget will be executed if a user continues from a previous session. If you have purchased the Bookmark Widget from here then you will be able to use it by creating a blank slide in Captivate as your first slide and inserting the Load Data Widget on that. You should then insert the Bookmark Widget on slide two instead of slide one.

The Widget will not work in Adobe Captivate 6 projects exported to HTML5.

Package contents:

The download package contains the Save and Load Data Widgets for Adobe Captivate and a Delete Data Widget. It also contains the two Save and Load Username Widgets for Adobe Captivate found here. It also includes the Adobe Captivate 5 source files used to create the demonstration of the widget so you can see how that is built. Finally it contains help documentation for the widgets.

Demonstration:

This demonstration shows a simple menu with 5 chapters and demonstrates how the status of each chapter is updated on the Main Menu. The demonstration also makes use of the Save and Load Username Widgets in order to tie the data to individual users.

Buy the widget:

01 x Single Developer License – $20

03 x Single Developer License – $54

05 x Single Developer License – $80

10 x Single Developer License – $140

25 x Single Developer License – $300