List of problems with Lectora 2006
March 3, 2006 12:00 AM
I don't blame the programmers at Trivantis for any problems with Lectora. Its the testers who should be finding the problems.After using Lectora 2006 for the first hour I had found several problems which I consider non-trivial to the work I was doing.I don't understand how a tester could miss them, so striking they are. I should have written a small list cos I don't think I've covered them all here.This is for html publish.1) on select/change on question objects. Half the time it completely crashes Lectora when utilising these.2) £ sign in drop down box. Unfortunatly I had to have a lot of pages with dropdowns with £ sign in. When populating textboxes with the drop down variable, it would be like u00A3500,000. Instead of £500,000.3) Why can't you put an apostrophe in a dropdown box? I have to put say manufacturer&-#39;s in order to get manufacturer's. (that hyphen is in so it doesn't convert to html on this page here)4) Apostrophes in general in variables. I told Trivantis about this problem 2 years ago and still it remains. People who know a little programming know that it is full of aprostophes and speech marks in functions etc. Putting apostrophes into variables can cause havoc. For instance changed the contents of a variable to It is not the manufacturer's responsibility but Rentokil'sUpon compiling to html I get a series of javascript errors. The first being Expected ')'followed by'image66' is undefined'button52' is undefinedetcgetting rid of the apostrophes got rid of the problem. I had to reword.I trivialise. This took me HOURS to work out.5) Text comparisons with apostrophes in. won't work most of the time. get rid of apostrophes. No problem.6) WORST PROBLEM. The whole cookie problem. A couple of years back I wasted about 3 days trying to find out why when I got up to question 40, suddenly all the variables would null. Eventually a kind soul at Trivantis told me that the cookie had been filled and overwriting existing data. I was recommended to make the answers to questions, a., b., c. Thus reducing text written to the cookie. This worked.With 2006 I found the same problem. The Reset All Vars action in 2006 makes this happen after only about 20 questions. Avoid that action, it seems to write even more to the cookie.7) Grouping actions. Sorry guys. This just isn't reliable when you've got more than just a group or two. A royal way to screw up your work is to copy groups of actions. Lectora hates that. Leading to either unaccountable beahviour or javascript errors.Ungrouping the very same actions I have found to normally get rid of this problem. (thank goodness).8) Unfortunately lectora seems to declare every varibale in the title on every html page. A decent sized project can end up having far too large html page sizes due to this quantity of variable text in the source file of each html page.I know there are more problems I just haven't written down. I'm not supposed to be a tester.I know there are problems with software but they should be documented so other people won't waste their work time(which is money), like I have. But I bet marketing don't like that suggestion.
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