Previewing your Intervention

The Preview function starts the local server on your PC and loads your intervention on to it. It is ideal for quickly checking what your pages will look like on a web browser, checking that your logic is working and testing the interactions and links. We strongly recommend regularly previewing your intervention to check it is working as you expect it to.

Some Important points about previewing:

• Make sure your intervention logic is correct and there are no problems/errors in the intervention before you preview it.
• You do not need to have an internet connection to view your intervention in Preview mode.
• You cannot share your intervention with others over the internet using the preview function (i.e. it does not generate a URL link that you can then send to others. If you want to share your intervention with others, you will need to Export your intervention and upload it onto the LifeGuide Community Website.
• Some logic functions (e.g. e-mail, text messaging, randomisation) cannot be tested in preview function. To test these functions you will need to export and upload the intervention.

At this stage you may have only thought about the look and feel of the intervention and how you add different objects to a page.

If you would like to just see how a couple of pages look when viewed online you will need to use the show logic command. To preview your intervention:

Click on the Preview icon in the Main option bar A pop-up box will allow you to choose which project you want to preview and how you want to preview it (Figure 1).If you have several projects in the Authoring Tool, select the project you want to preview by clicking on the drop-down list and clicking on the project you want to preview. If you only have one project in the Authoring Tool, it will already be selected.

Figure 1: Previewing your intervention

Now you need to decide how you want to preview your project. There are three options (i) Intervention project (default) will preview the whole project so that you can test the links, buttons, etc on each page; (ii) Single page will provide you with a list of the pages in your project so that you can view pages individually – this is useful for checking the layout of a page; (iii) Debug mode (Advanced users only) is for programmers to view the QTI.

Previewing in different web browsers

Your intervention will appear in your default web browser. From time-to-time, it is a good idea to test your intervention in other web browsers too (i.e. internet explorer 7, Firefox, etc). This is because each browser will show the intervention a little differently and you may need to tweak the positioning of some objects to make sure they look right in the different browsers that your end-user may use. Your intervention will preview in your default web browser. To preview in another browser, simply copy and paste the URL from your default browser into another browser.

NB. Your intervention will display differently in Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 so you should check how it looks in both of theses browsers.