Adobe Captivate: Looking to Combine SWFs Into One Menu? Think Aggregator!

by Kevin Siegel

In an ideal world, your Captivate projects would be kept to a respectable number of slides (fewer than 150). Why? Large projects will take longer to produce, longer to publish, take longer for users to download and, most importantly, take longer to complete. (I suggest creating lessons that a learner can finish in five minutes, which typically translates to around 80-100 interactive slides.)

Of course, there may be occasions where you want to take several small projects and bring them together into one project-without actually importing slides or objects from one project into another.

If you publish your projects as SWFs, you can combine multiple SWF files into one lesson using the Aggregator. Once added to an Aggregator project, you can publish the combined files as a SWF, EXE file, PDF or HTML. The published Aggregator file will include a TOC using the names of the separate SWF files.

To ensure uniformity of TOC settings across lessons, you can set any SWF in the TOC as the master. The TOC settings of the master are applied to all the other SWFs in the Aggregator.

To create an Aggregator Project:

1. Publish two or more Captivate projects as SWFs.
2. Choose File > New > Aggregator Project.
3. The Create New Project dialog box appears. If necessary, select Action Script 2.0 from the Aggregator Project area.

   

   If you intend to use your Captivate lessons within other applications such as Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR applications or Flex, the Action Script version you select is important. AIR and Flex only support ActionScript 3.0; Flash supports ActionScript versions 2.0 and 3.0. In addition, users must have Flash Player 9 or later installed on their computers to view Captivate SWFs created using ActionScript 3.0.

4. Click OK.
5. Click the Add Module button at the bottom of the Aggregator window and open the SWFs you published in the first step above.

   

6. The SWF appears in the Module Title area of the Aggregator.

   

7. Click the Save tool and save the Aggregator project.
8. Publish the project by clicking the Publish tool at the top of the Aggregator window.

   

9. When finished publishing, View the output.

   Thanks to the Aggregator, your published SWFs are now played through the common TOC. If you open the folder containing your published assets, you will find a SWF created by the Aggregator along with the SWFs you added to the TOC as modules. Be sure to keep all of these files together when you upload the files to your Web server.