Certificate Viewer Date Issue 2015

[Original Issue - Jan 6th, 2015]

This article outlines an issue that affects all Brain 3 courses developed/deployed on or before January 6th 2015. The problematic file is the certificateViewer.swf file.

[Update Jan 9, 2015]

A secondary issue was discovered with the index.html file that would prevent the date of completion from being saved when a user clicked the browser exit button instead of a course exit button. This issue has also been resolved.

The Issue

The problem was that on non-FiLMs LMSes, and under certain circumstances, the certificate would show the date of printing instead of the actual date of completion the course. This would also happen if the user clicked the browser exit button instead of the course exit button.

We've resolved the issue in the certificate viewer and index.html files, and have put the updated files into Course Builder, so courses created with the latest Course Builder from January 9th, 2015 forward should not exhibit this issue. Sadly, old courses or courses currently in development will likely need to be manually updated to resolve the issue.

Which courses are affected?

All brain 3 courses produced on or before January 9th, 2015 are likely to exhibit this bad behavior on non-FiLMS LMSes under certain circumstances.

What's next?

Courses currently in development, those that come back with change orders or updates, and cases where a client reports seeing the issue will be the first to receive updates. Courses that have been deployed and have no client-reported concerns may not have been affected by this issue.

How does this affect me?

For the Content Design Team (or anyone that might need to hot-fix the issue):

All Brain 3 courses currently in development or that come back for change orders / updates should be updated.

To resolve the issue for your course, you will need to:

1. Update the certificateViewer.swf file in your export folder and within the course package (zip),
2. Update the index.html file within your course package (zip) only.
3. This can be done simply by following the process below:

To Update Your Certificate Viewer and index.html files :

1. Update the certificateViewer.swf file in your course export folder with the following file:
   1. Y:\ICOM Productions\__TEMPLATES__\Interface 3.0\certificate\certificateViewer.swf
2. Re-publish your course using the latest Course Builder (this will automatically give you the latest index.html file).
3. Either upload the new zip to update your course, or unzip the package and upload both the certificateViewer.swf and index.html files from the package.
4. Please also see "How to test that my certificate viewer is up to date", near the bottom of this page.

If you require further information / assistance, please speak to your project/team lead as a first point of contact.

If you are an ID/PM:

Please be aware of the issue, and remind the teams you work with to update the course certificate viewer file before deployment. If you receive reports of this issue occurring related to a recent course, please contact the development team attached to the project for assistance updating the certificate viewer. If a client contacts you to report this issue after it has long since gone live, we'll follow the standard process for requesting new resources.

For Account Managers / Business Dev:

If you receive reports of this issue, please notify the PM for the project if it is active, or create a sales support request if not.

If you are a person that QAs or Deploys content:

If you need to hot-fix a course that is already live, you can grab patch files from here:

Y:\ICOM Productions\__TEMPLATES__\ISSUE_PATCHES\2015_certificateIssuePatchFiles\

You will need to update both the certificateViewer.swf and the index.html file in your online course.

Please note that you will have to replace the #COURSENAME# in the title node of the index.html file with the actual course title when patching.

Example: For a course called "My Newly Updated Course", you will need to change the html

from:

How to test that my certificate viewer is up to date [do this first]:

When testing a course, it is possible to confirm that the certificateViewer.swf fix has been applied in the following way:

1. Complete the course (you can cheat if required).
2. Open the debugger window (if it was already open, click the "menu->clear" option on the debugger to clear the previous debug text.
3. Click the certificate button within the course.
4. If you DO NOT see a message in the debugger like the image below when you launch the certificate, your course needs to have its certificateViewer.swf updated.

1. (The message will always start with "PRE LAUNCH VALUES", followed by some debug information, and then "LaunchCert" with the username).
1. If you DO see a message like the above image, your certificateViewer is up to date.

Note: You will need the debugger open before clicking the certificate button in order to see this message.

How to test that my index.html is up to date [do this second]:

1. For courses you are working on locally:
   1. Open the index.html page in your published course package (not your export folder) with a tool like Notepad++.
   2. Examine line 27 of the code. If you see "var SAVEONCLOSE = true;", your index.html is up to date.
   3. If it is set to false, your index.html is out of date and must be updated.
2. For courses online:
   1. Open and complete the course. (You can cheat if required).
   2. Close the course.
   3. Re-open the course, and follow the steps under "How to test that my certificate is up to date".
   4. If you see:
      1. PRE LAUNCH VALUES: dc: null
         1. OR
      2. PRE LAUNCH VALUES: dc: undefined
      3. Your index.html is out of date and needs to be updated.
   5. If you see something like:
      1. PRE LAUNCH VALUES: dc: 2015-01-05
      2. (the date will match the actual date of completion)
      3. Your index.html (and certificate viewer) are up to date.