Using Variables as Action Target

Hi everyone, I’m very new to Intuiface and am coming from a long history of multimedia development, so, my model of how this should work might be off.

I am building an educational kiosk that works as a glossary of terms for a museum exhibit. There will be a list of words and when you tap on one, it pops up a description and photo. The descriptions have some links in them to other glossary terms. There is a home button that takes you back to the main list of words.

I’ve created one scene with multiple layers of content (the descriptions and pictures) that are triggered by buttons and animate off and on. I tried using multiple scenes but the media was loading at different times (it would appear on the screen in the layer order).

In order to reuse some elements, Instead of x buttons for x glossary terms, I’d like to have one home button that when pressed, fades out the current layer, and fades in the menu layer. In my mind, I would set a variable (like the Interface Asset Global Variable) and then have the Action Target be the value of the variable. I understand how binding works but there doesn’t seem to be a place to bind the variable to the targets in Scene Structure->Visibility and Effects->Hide. If I had to put a button on each layer, I’d try and use a this to reference the current layer but that doesn’t seem possible.

I might be thinking of this all wrong and my mental model could be flawed. I’m open to the best way to do this!

Thanks in Advance!

Hi Greg @gxwalsh and welcome to Intuiface community!

First, there’s no “wrong” way of thinking in my opinion, especially when we talk about design. But there is definitely an “Intuiface way” of thinking that can make things easier.

Before going further in your question, I’d recommend you to have a look at

  • this article showing how to display a summary list (your glossary terms) with a detail view (the associated photo & description).
  • and more generally this Webinar recording about connecting an Intuiface experience to external data. I think you could use an Excel file to organise your glossary terms and make your experience structure way simpler.

Let me know if this would make sense and help in your design.

Seb

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I’m glad to be here.

Thanks for that article! I’ve read some other ones about that concept and really thought about using Excel as a data source. That would work except that the glossary definitions have links to other glossary definitions with in. I looked for using the rich text asset’s HTML features to hyper link to scenes or triggers.

Could I make a set of HTML pages and use the HTML asset? Does that work on iPads (my deployment)?

Is there any chance there are global functions that can be triggered via HTML links within the Experience?

I wouldn’t go the with the HTML way, since you’d lose the advantage of Intuiface and would end up writing quite some “code” there.

You can see here how to associate multiple and variable number of items to an Excel entry. Based on this mechanism, you could have these references to other glossary entries that would call the proper Intuiface actions to display new content.

Seb

That’s really interesting and might be useful in another part of the project. The limitation here is the words in the glossary definition need to be able to be clicked to go to another definition. For example, “Cat- an animal who steps on my keyboard” and the word “keyboard” needs to be clickable to go to the definition for “keyboard”. This is why I thought about using text boxes and putting invisible rectangles on the key words that trigger the process “fade out this layer, fade in new layer”. and I’m doing that to prevent the images from “popping” up in order.

Is there some way to pre-load the images if using multiple scenes? That might solve my problem. I tried multiple scenes with experience layers but every time I ran it on the ipads, the images would pop in as if they had never been loaded when I switched between scenes (and I checked animation settings to make sure each one didn’t have a timing on it).

What would be the Intuiface-way of thinking about this? :slight_smile:

This where the path will split depending on the Intuiface user profile :slight_smile:

Because I like to make things generic and easily reusable, I’d probably do, or at least investigate, the following:

  • use an HTML Frame to present your text. Text can be stored in Excel and contain hyperlinks.
  • use “fake” hyperlinks that just contain the name of the table entry. For ex: “keyboard”.
  • use the “link is clicked” trigger of the HTML Frame to know when a user touches a special keyword.
  • use this “link” - with a converter to keep only the right keyword - to apply a new filter on Excel and display the right content.

HTML asset with embedded links:

Link is clicked trigger (imagine calling an Excel filter instead of my “set text”)

When clicked, the “link” looks like this:

To retrieve the text after the last “/”, you can use such a converter out of the clicked link.

I know, it just became a bit more technical, but that would be “my way” :wink:

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Holy smokes. :open_mouth:

I’m going to have to try this out sometime!

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That’s exactly what I was looking for! Thank you!

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