CALCULATING THE DURATION OF A QUIZ

Need to know how long it took the user to complete your quiz? Unfortunately ToolBook does not have any built in feature to tell you this information so you have to figure it out yourself.

In OpenScript, there are a variety of ways to calculate the duration, but if you want to export to DHTML your options are very limited in how to approach this task.

One way would be to use the Date and Time fields from the Text Fields catalog category. Since those auto-Update with current information it is possible to read the text of those fields and do the complex math of churning out a duration.

I decided to take a different approach. The Action Timer catalog object has the ability to report the current time in milliseconds. So, if you put one of these on your first page to acquire the Start time, and also one on your last page to acquire the end time, you can fairly easily subtract the difference and know the total milliseconds that have passed.

Using a little more math you can convert the milliseconds to seconds or something even better such as a time displayed in the format of hh:mm:ss.

This sample does just that, working both in Native ToolBook as well as DHTML.

DOWNLOAD DURATION.ZIP

• This download contains one .TBK file.

• You can examine how it works, by looking at all the Actions Editor code. You may find it useful to use the Tools menu to access the Dump Book Actions option in order to see all the code I wrote.

• Download this 47K file   |   8.5/8.6    |   2004    |   9.0