Setting up the widget in Adobe Captivate

You can view the video below here for a complete walkthrough and explanation of all functions in the Reporting Widget, or you can follow the written instructions below.

Before you insert the widget in your Abobe Captivate project you should have decided on if you want to use the Google Sheets / Google Mail service or not. If you want to use these services you should start following the instructions in this article – Setting up a new Google Sheet – and return here when you are ready.

The same goes for the External PHP script – If you have decided to use the external PHP script to send emails, you should go through this article – Using the external PHP script – to see if you need to do anything first.

The next step is to open up Adobe Captivate and insert the widget on the first slide of your project. If you don’t know how to do that, please follow the instructions here – Downloading and using your widget

The widget can be placed anywhere on the slide but to avoid the widget “covering” up interactive items on your project slides, place it in a spot that does not contain interactive items (click boxes, mouse-overs, quiz question answer options etc.).  You can also resize the widget so it only covers a small spot on your slide.

When you insert the Reporting Widget the Widget properties panel will open up.

The widget Properties Panel is divided into 5 main sections.

Google service settings:

In this section, you define if you want to use the Google Sheets service and also if you want to use the Google Mail service. You cannot use the Google Mail service without using the Google Sheet service.

In the Google Web-app URL, you insert the URL to the Web-app you published when you followed the Setting up a new Google Sheet instructions.

Email settings:

In this section, you define the email address of the person who will be receiving the email from the widget (Receiver email).

You can also define a Sender email address, although this will only be supported if you use the external PHP script. Mails sent from the Google Mail Service will be sent from the mail account associated with the Google Account you are using, but it will use the “Sender email” as the “Reply-to” email.

In the E-mail subject field, you must enter the text you wish to have as subject on the email being sent.

The final option here is “Send copy to student”. If you enable this, the widget will send a copy of the email to the email address picked up from the custom variable “v_email” in addition to the recipient defined in the receiver email field. If you opt to use this option, you must create a custom variable called “v_email” yourself and make sure that this is populated with the users’ email address. Please see these instructions if you need help with that – Adding custom variables in Adobe Captivate

External script settings:

In this section, you define if you want the widget to use the external PHP script to send emails or not.

If you activate “Use external script to send mail”, you will need to either upload a copy of the 4 PHP files along with your published project files or use the custom script location and point to where you stored the PHP files. Please follow the instructions in this article – Using the external PHP script

The “Use SMTP mail service” is deactivated by default. In this case, the PHP script will send the email using the standard PHP mail functionality and no further setup is required. The caveat is that emails sent like this have a higher risk of ending up in the spam/junk mail folder of the user. To reduce the chance of this occurring you can opt to use SMTP mail service instead. Please see the instructions here for details – Using the external PHP script

The final option is the “Custom script location” and “Script location”. If you plan on using the PHP script for many projects, it will be easier if you upload the PHP scripts to a fixed location on your web server. That way you can simply insert the URL to where you have placed the scripts and you won’t have to upload the scripts every time you publish a project. The format for the URL is http(s)://www.yourdomain.com/scriptlocation/

General settings:

In this section, you define which data you would like the widget to transfer to the email and/or Google Sheets.

“Include question data” – If you activate this option, the widget will transfer information about each question the user answered in the project.

“Include custom variables” – If you activate this option, the widget will transfer any variables you insert in the “Custom variable names” box below. If you have a custom variable called “vBusinessArea” you would simply enter “vBusinessArea” in the box and this variable will be transferred automatically. If you have more than one variable you would like to transfer, you enter them with a comma (,) separating them like this: vBusinessArea,vBusinessUnit,vCountry,vManagerName – note that you should not have any spaces between the variable names.

You can also transfer additional Adobe Captivate variables if you like. Any variable available in Adobe Captivate can be included, so if you, for example, have a project using GeoLocation, you could send the user’s Geolocation by adding the “cpInfoGeoLocation” variable to the Widget. You can find all available variables under the menu “Project” – “Variables”

The final option is “I’m not using a Quiz Result Slide”. If you for some reason have decided not to use the default Adobe Captivate Quiz Results Slide, you will need to enable this option so the widget will know when it should send the data. If you are not using a Quiz Result Slide, the widget will send the data when the Quiz Scope has been fulfilled (quiz is passed or all attempts used) and the user reaches the last slide of the project.

CPGURU Service:

This section is not active yet and will be included in a later update of the widget.

Final setup of the widget in Adobe Captivate

When you have set up the widget and filled out all relevant properties, click OK to return to Adobe Captivate.

The next step is to set the widget to “Display for rest of project“.

Once you have done this, everything is set up and ready to go. You can hide the widget on the first slide (make it invisible) so that you don’t see the widget image on all slides in your project. The Widget Image is of course only visible to you in the Adobe Captivate application – it will not be visible to the user.

The next step is to publish your project and upload it to your web server or Learning Management System and test that everything works.  If something is not working, please follow the instructions in this article – Troubleshooting