Digital Workshop

I am having a problem with certain links after having published and am having a terrible time figuring out why it is happening. Any help would be appreciated. Here's the way it goes:

I have a series of flash based presentations that were created in Captivate. I am displaying them within an Opus application through a browser window on a "Presentation Page". On this page it is set to navigate to a presentation through a variable <presentationlink>.

So on a page there is information which the student sees. On the page there are hotlinks for the student to view a presentation. Clicking the link sets the variable to the desired file location of the html file for the presentation and then goes to the "presentation page".

This has worked all along when I previewed the application. Prior to publishing I changed each link to <PUBLICATION_CD_DRIVE>\presentations\appropriate folder\html file. Then I publish, create distribution files, copy files as well as the Presentation folder and all of its subfolders. When I run the application everything works except for these presentations. When I click the link it goes to the presentations page and a standard browser error message appears in the browser window.

I have checked and double checked the file names and all syntax.
I have one of the presentations open in a browser window on its own page (without using the presentations page and variable link) and it DOES work so I do not believe it is the content (HTML or Flash) that is causing it.
I have other content in the presentation folder on the CD and this works.
I have pulled out most of my hair and don't know what to do next.

Any thoughts?
Is there any reason this method would work in preview mode but not after it is actually published?

Thanks
Dave
Opus Pro XE 5
Windows XP Pro
Pentium 4

Hi Dave,

I think you'll find the Opus system variable is supposed to be <SYSTEM_CD_DRIVE>.

However, if you're running Opus from the CD, then it may be better to use the <SYSTEM_PUBLICATION_DIR> variable. (You may also want to check if you're using the appropriate forward or backward slash for your directory folders if it's html?)

Hopefully someone who has good experience in using 'browser windows' may be of help.

If it were me I would use the following:

<SYSTEM_PUBLICATION_DIR>presentations\appropriate folder\html file

" <SYSTEM_PUBLICATION_DIR> " is always the best option to use as Opus always knows were it is running from. The CD variable tend to look for the first cd drive on the system and with more and more machines having more than one drive this can cause problems.


Regards

Brenden Knifton

Steve and Brenden

Thank you both for the comments and suggestions.

As a correction I did have the variable as <SYSTEM_CD_DRIVE> in the publication but wrote it incorrectly in the earlier Post. Sorry for the confusion. With the correct variable, should this work when published?

The reason I had not used the <SYSTEM_PUBLICATION_DIR> was that I had the publication setup to install from the CD and then only access the presentations off the CD. My thoughts were that this would cause it to run faster than doing everything from the CD. Is this a reasonable way to look at it or is it just as well to do it off the CD?

The other thought was to put everything onto the student's PC. The issues here were that I didn't want to consume a lot of hard drive space and secondly, I would need to did further into an installation program that would support the extra directories.

Any thoughts?

Thanks
Dave

If it were me I would run it all from the CD.

When you run an EXE it get loaded into memory on you pc. It will then run at the same speed regardless of if it was loaded from cd or hard drive.
As you are reading your resources from cd you might as well run the publication from there. This reduces the need to install anything on the end users machine.

<SYSTEM_CD_DRIVE> always has the potential to fail due to more than one drive as explained in earlier post.

Regards

Brenden Knifton