Oracle UPK - Generating a Stand-Alone Glossary

After seeing the usefulness of a Glossary, you're no doubt wondering if it is possible to either include a complete Glossary in an outline, or publish a Glossary to a stand-alone document that you could (for example) hand out during training. Unfortunately, UPK does not provide this capability (although it crops up reasonably often on the Feature Request forum, so there is a distant possibility that UPK may add this functionality in a future release). However, with a bit of effort there is an acceptable workaround.

This workaround relies on the fact that a Training Guide will include a Glossary table that contains Glossary entries (term/definition) for each Glossary term hyperlinked in the course (or other selected outline element). So to generate such a table that includes all Glossary entries, you simply need to publish a Training Guide for an outline element that contains all of the Glossary terms. How to create and publish an outline element specifically for this purpose is explained below:

To create a Word-format, complete Glossary, and carry out the steps described below:

1. Open your Glossary in the Library.

2. In the Glossary Editor, click on the first Glossary term, to select it.

3. Scroll down to the bottom of the Glossary, and Shift-click on the last Glossary term, to select the full range of Glossary entries in the Glossary. Your selection should look as shown in the following screenshot:

4. Copy (Ctrl+C) this information to the clipboard.

5. Close the Glossary Editor.

6. Create a new Web Page and open it for editing.

7. In the Web Page Editor, paste (Ctrl+V) the contents of the clipboard into the Web Page. This will be pasted as pure text, which will include the full file path of the Web Page, the Tooltip, and so on. But most importantly, it includes every glossary term in your Glossary. Don't worry about editing or formatting this Web Page; we will not use it in this form. Your Web Page will look similar to the example in the following screenshot:

8. Use the Properties pane to assign your Glossary to this new Web Page (as described in a previous section of this chapter). This is very important; the glossary links will not be updated if you don't assign the Glossary to the Web Page.

9. Save and close your new Web Page.

10. Back in the Library, click on your new Web Page, and then select menu option Edit|Update Glossary Links. This will turn all of the Glossary terms in the Web Page into hyperlinks to the associated Glossary entries.

11. Create a new outline element (Module or Section) and attach this new Web Page to this element as the Concept.

12. Publish this outline element as a Training Guide.

Once the publishing process is complete, open the generated Training Guide. At the bottom, you will find a section labeled Glossary that contains a table with all of your glossary terms and definitions in it. You can then reformat this, or extract it and copy it to somewhere else, or do whatever else you want with it.

Note that this is a one-time (one-way) activity. Any new terms that you add to the Glossary will not automatically be included in your dummy Glossary outline element. However, assuming that you just want to generate a quick and simple Word-based Glossary, for example for distributing during your initial training, then this is an adequate solution in the absence of any official functionality from UPK.

In Chapter 12, Configuring UPK, we look at a way of building our own dedicated Glossary document type. However, this is fairly technical and is therefore recommended only for experienced users. If you are a developer working in a client/server environment, you may not even have access to be able to define your own document types, in which case the quick-and-dirty solution offered above is quite likely your best bet.

Summary

Although recording a simulation is just a matter of clicking the Record button, running through the task in the system, and you're done, producing quality training material is not really this simple. Yes, the simulation may work (if you're lucky), but it won't be of a particularly high quality. Producing high-quality training material in UPK requires a lot more work.

Things that you can do to improve the quality of a Topic include the following:

• Providing business context and additional explanations through the use of Custom Text
• Providing additional information via Web Pages
• Attaching relevant documents through the use of Packages
• Providing an on-line Glossary

These things are the bells and whistles that improve the trainee's experience. Because they are 'add-ons' to the basic recording, some developers may choose not to use them (or find that their project management has not allocated them enough time to add them). However, taking the time to add this level of features will greatly improve the overall usability of your exercises, and you will certainly see an increase in trainee satisfaction (assuming that you take post-training feedback—which you should).

Where to buy this book

You can buy from the Packt Publishing website: You can buy from the Packt Publishing website: http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-user-productivity-kit-upk-35/book 

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