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FileLocation = Sloppy programming??

How many times have you stored external media under the FileLocation? I've done it way too often and it has never caused a problem, or so I thought.

Recently I migrated some courseware from Authorware 6.0 to 7.0 and realized all my external media references would be broken thereby causing the web-player to redownload 100's of megs worth of media over the network all because FileLocation had changed from ..\NP32ASW\AW60 to ..\NP32ASW\AW70.

Did I mention my audience only had 15kbps?

So instead of making that mistake again I now store all external media 1 folder above the FileLocation. Therefore regardless of what version of AW my content gets published in my users will never have to redownload pre-existing external files.

So how do we code this?

The old way looked something like this:
-- in Authorware script
ExternalImage := FileLocation ^ "MyMedia\\external.gif"
#  in the map file
put MyMedia
bin win32 "external.gif" "external.gif" recycle,length=220


The new and improved method looks like:
-- in Authorware script
ExternalImage := GetLine(FileLocation, 1 , LineCount(FileLocation, "\\")-1 , "\\") ^ "MyMedia\\external.gif"
#  in the map file
put ..\MyMedia
bin win32 "external.gif" "external.gif" recycle,length=220

About Chris Phillips:

I have been dragging icons since '97 and scripting since '99.
I have primarily worked in the Transportation and Telecom industries with a stint doing LMS's with IBM while picking up the occasional freelance gig here and there.
My preferences are currently XML and JavaScript.

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