About a month ago, a subscriber asked me how to use the External Media Browser (EMB) to change the path to all the external files in a piece to look relative to FileLocation rather than in the directory the files were originally loaded from. We tried all sorts of variations in the expression, but we could not get the EMB to accept the variable FileLocation plus the literal name of the file from when it was imported.
I recently inherited a group of files which used the SearchPath variable to solve this problem. However, this solution meant that users had to wait while Authorware checked the original location where the file was loaded from before the file checked Searchpath.
When you load a file and leave it linked externally, the External Media Browser has two fields that together contain the full path to the file. The top one contains the file name, and the bottom one contains the path to the directory where that file was when it was loaded. When you select a group of icons in the EMB, if the graphics were all loaded from the same place, the top field will change to a "*", and the bottom field will contain the original path.
These particular graphic files were stored in a subdirectory of the same directory
that contained the Authorware file. However, the
"Path" field in the EMB contained "\\SomenetworkDrive\
WorkGroup\ProjectCategory\ThisProject\Graphics\".
Obviously, none of that applied anymore, except
the Graphics directory. So I shortened it to ".\Graphics\",
and the graphics now pop up immediately, without
the long wait.
My thanks to Dan Wilson, for giving me the
idea for this Tip. Dan, it's two months late,
but maybe it can still help you.