Imsmanifest File Size
March 10, 2016 12:00 AM
Hey everyone. I'm not sure exactly how to describe my issue so I may end up casting a larger net than usual. Essentially, since approximately version 12.1.2, I've noticed the size of my imsmanifest.xml files when publishing to SCORM 1.2 have grown quite a bit (approximate 4x larger). The course hasn't changed, just the version of Lectora publishing it.
At first, I didn't think much of it. I figured it related to the new way Lectora handled buttons. However, I've been running into LMS systems (Moodle, Meridian) which are unable to import my courses. They basically time out while importing the courses. The fix in the past has been to import an older version of my course built and published with v11. Now, however, I've migrated far too many courses to v12.1.4 and v16.0.2 for that solution to work.
I've noticed that v16 produces smaller imsmanifest files than v12 (about half the size), but still larger than v11 (twice as large). My clients in question are getting about 50% import success rate with the v16 courses. The crazy thing is that some courses with smaller imsmanifest files are failing while larger courses are importing. Seems like the issue may not limited to imsmanifest file size alone.
Has anyone experienced similar issues importing v12 and v16 SCORM courses??
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Discussion (1)
At some point (in 11 or 12) the way how buttons are published was changed. The new system generated 4 images per button, even for transparent buttons. So the number of published files increased along with the manifest size (since the manifest lists every file in the course, twice). In Lectora 16, this was fixed and unnecessary images aren't generated any more, which speeds up publishing and decreases course size.
So the LMS timeout can be both due to the manifest size (which can take a long time to process) and due to the sheer number of files in the zip archive to be extracted on server. You should try:
a) using Lectora 16
b) using Lectora 12 and manually editing imsmanifest.xml before publish. With most LMS, you can safely remove the list of image files, they will be processed anyway. In my experience with BranchTrack.com SCORM output, we've only seen one or two LMS that required full manifest.
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