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Content Builder beta testers needed
Significant discounts for beta testers. Most
active of them will get the software free. |
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Content Builder™ (CB) is the latest
product in the line of plug-ins for batch content development offered
by ESD Multimedia. This plug-in not only can read story boards in
the original Word/Excel format, whereas the previous BatchProducer
and DynaPages Generator used
text format, but also makes the process as easy as drawing tables
and filling cells with your information. |
| What is Content Builder™? |
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 Content
Builder is a special plug-in for building Toolbook content from MS
Excel/Word story boards. If you already have CB installed, all you
need to do then is:
- arrange content in a form of table or tables,
- add to these tables special headings that describe the content
type and the task which is supposed to be done with this content,
- save content in Word or Excel file,
- load Toolbook book which the content will be added to,
- launch CB, open story board file and
- push BUILD button.
In several minutes CB will created a book of several hundreds of
pages with text and illustrations, hyperlinks and catalog objects.
Using CB you are getting the full control over your content, making
the process of development from the first stages writing story boards
and designing Toolbook templates to the last stages of generating
of final product very simple. All steps of creating toolbook application
can be stored in a single CB Project File and can be executed as a
single action sometimes consisting of thousands of operations.
Moreover, CB plug-in contains another tool named Content Explorer™,
which exports existing ToolBook content of a specific type to Word/Excel
story boards. Read more about Content
Explorer. |
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- support of MS Word/Excel formats of story boards.
- project managing and support of multiple MS Word/Excel documents
- log file generation
- open and expandable architecture. The power and ability of CB
to work with different types of content and Toolbook objects confines
in its libraries. Read more about CB
libraries.
- support of rich text format and Clipboard operations.
- support of dynamic arrays.
- HeadingScript™ visual language of content description and
operation with tabular data. Dynamic compilation of HeadingScript™
table headings into executable OpenScript code.
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Content Builder™ is more than a story board
oriented batch development tool. It is a tool for operation with TABULAR
data in the process of content design. I'm sure that everybody who
uses Toolbook for CBT development at least one time used Word or Excel
TABLES for storing project information. This information could be
the names of the pages, text content of Toolbook fields or recordFields,
names of graphic files, etc. Just for these cases Content Builder
provides you with easy, flexible and effective means of converting
text content into Toolbook format.
Generally speaking, the whole process of creating of
ToolBook book can be divided into several steps or tasks. Most common
of them are
- creating pages
- adding text and pictures to pages
- setting properties of different question objects
- adding hyperlinks, etc.
 From
CB point of view each of the tasks can be linked with a table, which
heading identifies the type of the data used and operations that should
be done with this text data. The very simple task of creating pages
from other pages that serve as templates can be accomplished by using
the following table, where yellow cells are the heading. Interpreting
such table Content Builder calls CreatePageFromTemplate()
library function, substituting formal parameters N,
Name and templatePage with actual values
from table rows, thus creating three page named "P1", "P2"
and "P3" from template page "T1". With the same
easiness can create hundreds and thousands of new pages by simple
adding rows to the table.
The headings can have very complex structure and constructing tables
in CB is like writing a programs or algorithms for manipulation with
tabular data. You may use very wide and very long tables, use CB library
functions or write your own to control special objects and perform
special tasks. You can place as many tables in a single document as
you like and combine different documents in the single project. The
program, executing your HeadingScript™ "programs",
will do all steps quickly and precisely. |
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| Content Builder™
can be called "tabular interpretator" that executes
HeadingScript programs, where the number of iterations in the
loop depends on the table length and number of tables. This is
very close to the real situation. Special CB compiler transforms
table headings into executable OpenScript code, the example of
which you can see to the right. For this example calling F5()
function CB executes all nested handlers for each of the table
rows. Dynamically generated OpenScript code extracts values from
the table and pass them to function CreatePageFromTemplate(),
that in its turn adds new pages, names and numerates them. |
to
get F5
get F4(); return null
end
to
get F4
v1=F1(); v2=F2(); v3=F3()
ref=Field id 2 of Page id 4 of Book "E:\
...\CB.tbk"
get CreatePageFromTemplate(v2,v3,v1) of ref
send CB_setContext it,null,0; return it
end
to get F3
system string s_CB_xlParametersRow[]
get s_CB_xlParametersRow[3]; return it
end
to get F2
system string s_CB_xlParametersRow[]
get s_CB_xlParametersRow[2]; return it
end
to get F1
system string s_CB_xlParametersRow[]
get s_CB_xlParametersRow[1]; return it
end |
Though HeadingScript™ allows you addressing Toolbook objects
and setting their properties directly without calling library, built
in routines, custom routines or third parties libraries makes Content
Builder the tool with almost unlimited capabilities. The basic set
of built in CB routines supports following operations, and much more
will be added soon
- creation and deletion of pages
- import of graphics as paintObjects
- import of toolbook resources (bitmaps, clips, etc.)
- operations with recordFields
- creation of hyperlinks
- initialization of some catalog objects, etc.
Please, refer to Content Builder Operation
Manual, Samples or
How To sections to learn
to construct tables and call specific library routines. |
| Efficient development rules |
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There are several basic principles of toolbook development following
which you can make the process less robust and complete project in
short time minimizing the efforts of future update and support.
- Don't combine content development, OpenScript programming and
interface design in one process. Make them as independent as possible.
- Use the most convenient tool for each of operations. It's better
to use MS Word for instructional designer than Toolbook.
- Use page templates.
- Use dynamic content pages or objects (such as catalog objects).
Instead of changing OpenScript code of page or object set their
properties.
- All objects in the book must have unique names.
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Development of custom functions and libraries.
Read more ...
Third parties libraries distribution program. Read more
... |
