Step 1: Before adding the
Widget to your ToolBook project
There are several steps that
you can take prior to adding the EspritLMS Widget to your
ToolBook project that will help assure that process goes
smoothly. Actually, for many people these steps will
just serve as a reminder of good development practices, but
they are worth mentioning just the same :-)
Important Rules for Naming Your BooksAs soon as you drag the Shared Actions Widget
into your book it will add a
series of global variables and shared Actions to your project. One of the global variables
is EspritLMS_CourseID. When you add the Shared Actions Widget to your book,
the EspritLMS_CourseID variable will be set to the name of your book. The EspritLMS_CourseID
now must match up with the name of the folder that ToolBook creates when you
export your course. When you export a course, ToolBook will use the name of your book as the name of the export folder, except it will make
it all LOWER CASE. Also, when you put the course up to your EspritLMS site,
you will keep the name of the folder the same as the name of the export folder.
So, let's quickly summarize:
tbk filename = EspritLMS_CourseID = export folder name = folder name in EspritLMS
FOR THIS REASON...
You MUST follow the guidelines below for naming your book. If you
follow these guidelines tbk filename WILL EQUAL EspritLMS_CourseID WILL EQUAL
export folder name WILL EQUAL folder name in EspritLMS and you will be golden!
- Only Alpha-numeric (a-z, 0-9) and underscore
- Max Length – 15
- All lowercase
Acceptable
Filenames
|
Unacceptable
Filenames
|
| 38a01.tbk |
38A01.tbk |
| my_project.tbk |
my project.tbk |
|
tbk_course215.tbk |
ToolBookCourse-215.tbk |
Finally, we recommend you thoughtfully name your books before adding the
Shared Actions Widget. If you rename your book after adding the Widget,
you will need to modify the EspritLMS_CourseID global variable following the
protocol in the above bullet points. If you do not do this, your course
WILL NOT run in EspritLMS and you will need to fix the global variable and
re-export your entire program.
Testing
Your Export BEFORE Adding the Widget
If you are adding EspritLMS
functionality to an existing book we highly recommend the
following approach. Before you add the EspritLMS Widget
and objects, make any
necessary updated and changes to your project. Then, export the book to confirm that it
is functioning properly. Once you are happy with the way that the
course is running, it will be simple to add the EspritLMS
Widget and objects to your project. This will make
troubleshooting easier for us if you do have problems after
adding the widget.
A Quick
Note on Backgrounds
Less backgrounds make a book easier to work with
and reduce the overhead when running in dhtml. Equally important
it will also make
it easier to add EspritLMS components to your project if you are
putting them on the background. |
