Question Bank sends cmi.suspend_data through the roof!

Hi Luciana, I cant share it - this is under client NDA.

After working all afternoon I have found out some interesting things though.

The randomised Question Bank doesnt seem to be adding in many additional characters to the suspend_data. I removed the Question Bank, and just went with the same 10 questions, but set up sequentially; one after the other. However, the suspend_data is still having over 2000 characters added to it over these 10 questions!

Another interesting thing is when I look at the actual suspend_data, I can see many many examples of what I would consider totally unnecessary bloat in the data being sent.

For example, in many places, we have the following strings of characters:

• "g_default"
• "g_default_Visited"
• "g_default_Selected"

By the names being using, Im guessing this has something to do with States?

This seems to go against what Articulate themselves have said about Storyline. I understood that one of the things the engineers had done to ensure the suspend_Data was as small as possible was to compress and encode it. This doesnt seem very compressed to me.
"g_default_Selected" = 18 characters.
"g_d_s" = 5!

Its only a saving of 13 characters, but these instances are scattered a large number of times throughout the "suspend_data" and with a limit of only 4000 for SCORM 1.2 and 2004 (2nd Ed.) then being able to not waste several hundreds would be of significant value.

So, are States handled poorly in Storyline for the suspend_Data? If so, then interactive types like Drag-and-drops are naturally going to have a much larger suspend_data footprint than other slide types; given that they have more States by default.