Oracle UPK - Introduction Text: Version Differences

At this point, it is worth highlighting some key differences between the way the Introduction pane was handled prior to UPK 3.5, and the way that the Introduction pane is used in UPK 3.5.

If you open an Outline Element in the Outline Editor, and select a Topic in the navigation tree, you will see that the lower-right portion of the screen is labeled Introduction, as shown in the following screenshot:

You will recall from Chapter 5, Building and Outline, that the Outline Editor is used to organize content objects into the structure that the trainee will see. However, if we look at the published version of the Outline above, we will see the following:

Where has the Introduction Frame gone? Put simply. UPK 3.5 does not display the Introduction Frame in the Player any more. Users of UPK 2.x or OnDemand 9.x will recall that the Introduction Frame certainly used to be displayed, as shown in the
following screenshot, which is taken from OnDemand 9.1.5:

Quite why Oracle decided to change the way the Introduction pane is displayed (or not) in version 3.5 is a mystery (maybe they felt that with all that screen space required for the new Oracle branding, there just wasn't the space left to include the Introduction any more). However, it does have some important implications on the way that we are planning on using it.

This is because the effect of a publishing option associated with the Introduction pane has changed significantly. In the Publishing Wizard, the options for the Player package include an option to Show introduction text. In OnDemand version 9.1, this option determined whether the Introduction text appeared in the Outline as well as on the first Frame of the Player. However, in UPK 3.5, the Introduction text is never displayed in the Outline and the Show introduction text determines whether the Introduction text appears in the Player at all (effectively, it controls whether the Start Frame is included in the Player or not.

Version Difference

The Content Development manual for OnDemand 9.1.5 describes the Show introduction text option as working the way described for UPK 3.5. It doesn't work that way; it works the way described for OnDemand 9.1, above. This is clearly a rare case of the documentation being updated before the software.

For our purposes, therefore, we need to make sure that the Show introduction text option is always selected when we publish. This option can be found in the Player category of your Options, as shown in the next screenshot: