Every once in a while I will have a very complex Hype document that, upon output, seriously misbehaves. For example, a FAQ with text buttons for categories and questions. sometimes when clicked the button will suddenly jump to another location on the page or simply vanish.
While providing a sample document would normally be considered to be useful, this is not about whether something is being done correctly or in a preferred way, but about corruption. For this specific text button issue, it is something that has popped up now and again over the past two years. The only fix I found was to simply recreate the button and delete the screwed up one.
With a FAQ, however, I have one that has buttons for nine categories with an average of five question buttons per, times three layouts (135 text buttons)). Often everything will be fixed and functioning perfectly, but I might do something unrelated, such as change background art on an unrelated layer - not nested and at the very back, and then saved the buttons go ape - or it could be other things - a floating text title on a top non-nesting layer - totally random.
There have been a couple of projects that I had to set aside because I ended up playing whack-a-mole, then pick back up later, work on it, and then it functions properly. When it works properly I don’t dare make any alterations unless they are mission-critical.
I am wondering if there might be a bug with how Hype stores its data that might be causing things to be affected in this way.
I have seen some odd things like this.
Possibly the best thing you could do is send the project to the hype team when they are playing up and have them check the.
Also in the meantime you can save the projects as templates when you get to where you are happy and then use a template one to add and test changes…
Here’s an example - The text buttons at the left reveal a list of related questions at the right. Click on a question and the response appears in the area below.
At a wide breakpoint click on “Function” or “Materials”. The text button jumps 129 pixels to the right. Click on it again and it returns to its position. Note that it does not trigger the action.
What I have to do is to go through everything and if I find a button that does this, I dupe a healthy button, change the text and the action, and replace the faulty button. Once I go through everything and it all seems to be working properly, I output it and see if it really is fixed. If not, I go through it again. Generally, something always breaks.
Frankly, a FAQ system should be database driven (such as something created in FileMaker, etc.), but this is what I have.
I also see that sometimes, when editing the text of the button, the text will jump outside the button frame. While still displaying the correct line height, the text may display far below the frame - 30 pixels or more.
This particular project (along with an almost identical project for the parent company’s website) is something I’ve been working on for over a year, off and on. I get tired of playing whack-a-mole and set it aside for months at a time, then repeat the process.
I will duplicate a healthy button, set the appropriate text and action and replace the misbehaving button. I’ll save and output, but then some other button misbehaves. I’ve seen this happen with very simple projects as well.
The structure is busy but not very sophisticated. It is all about controlling the visibility of certain combinations of items. One timeline controls the categories, another controls the subcategories, and a third controls the individual items within the subcategories.
From a data perspective, we are storing data in a structured format and have probably only seen [our definition] of data corruption a couple times in the lifetime of Hype. (It is more likely that at a file level things will get corrupt, like resources missing). Most bugs that surface as corruption are invalid states from specific bugs. For example, I just came across a bug where Inner HTML animations pasted onto a persistent symbol instance would cause the document to not preview correctly. It doesn't make sense for a persistent symbol to have inner HTML, and the code made the assumption this would not happen - but there was a specific user path that could cause it which we had not protected against. Undo is another source where documents might get in invalid states.
As @h_classen pointed out, the button pressed state does have this position change. In this specific case, we do get similar reports, but I haven't been able to specifically determine it is a bug vs. unexpected user action. I'd love to see if there are steps that lead to this state outside normal behavior. Otherwise I still won't blame users; it is probably too easy to get where the position is changing on the button state and I'd like to improve this too!
We do have an open bug that certain inspector actions can cause an incorrect display of elements while editing. Generally this is only a temporary display issue. The "editing" mode is definitely a special case in the code though that needs a lot of extra handling and conditionals, and thus a more likely source of issues like this one. If you have specific steps feel free to send them to me (just so I can verify it is the known bug), and especially so if it causes any permanent issues in the document.
You and your team are first rate. I appreciate your attention to detail and your always positive and supportive attitude. Would that more companies were like Tumult.
