All you wanted to know about the manifest.xml file but were too busy to care about.

1. A brief explanation of the what? how? and huh? Of the manifest.xml
file on a SCORM 1.2 content package.

2. What’scoveredhere?
This slideshow is only a brief
explanation of the parts and purpose
of the manifest file, this is neither a
basic introduction, nor an advanced
guide to the SCORM standard.
This is just some commom
knowledge that everyone
developing SCORM compliant
e-learning courses should know.
Note:
This slideshow will only cover the
most basic elements of the
manifest, just the minimum required
for a SCORM 1.2 compliant package.
This is not an in-depth analysys

3. Pro-tip: get notepad++ or another text editor capable of saving text files encoded as
“UTF-8 without BOM”, the byte order mark (BOM) prevents the manifest from being
correctly parsed by the ADL test suite and some LMSs, and will result in lots of errors
reported without an obvious cause.
Firstthingsfirst:thexmlheader
A comment line usually follows, this tells us who created the file or
at least what software they used, this is an optional step, useful to
know who to blame if something goes wrong
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!-- Aurelio Maldonado aureliomld@gmail.com -->
Your manifest is an xml file, and as such it must start with a header
that states its version and encoding.

4. <manifest>
This is the main element of the xml file, it has a lot of parameters, the
first one is the identifier, this is allegedly used to prevent your e-learning
course from getting mixed up with another one by the same name.
Although this is really improbable, it’s still a good practice to give it a
unique identifier, usually the name of the course along with the date of
creation will do
<manifest identifier="MANIFEST-AMC-2013-05-16"
Next is the version, nothing fancy, this is just the version of
your course.
version="1.0"

5. <manifest>(cont.)
Next we have a few namespaces, this things are here to make sure that your
nodes don’t enter in conflict, there is no point in explaining all of them, if you
don’t know what a namespace is, you can find it here:
http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_namespaces.asp
xmlns="http://www.imsproject.org/xsd/imscp_rootv1p1p2"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:adlcp="http://www.adlnet.org/xsd/adlcp_rootv1p2"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.imsproject.org/xsd/imscp_rootv1p1p2
imscp_rootv1p1p2.xsd http://www.imsglobal.org/xsd/imsmd_rootv1p2p1
imsmd_rootv1p2p1.xsd
http://www.adlnet.org/xsd/adlcp_rootv1p2 adlcp_rootv1p2.xsd">
Dont mind those, just copy, paste and move along.

6. <organizations>,<organization>
Next we have the organizations node, pay attention, the next one is
the same, minus the plural, here we’ll just point to the default
organization, since this is a minimalist manifest, we’ll only have one
organization, so make it the default one.
<organizations default="AMC1">
Right below we find the organization node, make sure the identifier is
exactly the same as the default on the previous node.
<organization identifier="AMC1">

7. <title>
This is as easy as it gets, just type the name of your e-learning course
<title>Course title</title>
Pro-tip: LMSs tend to mess up course and SCOs names with special characters, I feel
bad for the orthography on your french and spanish courses, but the titles can’t have
accented vowels, and of course, no “Ñ”.

8. <item>
You have to make one of this for each module of your course, its two
parameters are both identifiers, they must be different, yet they refer
to the same item, so a good idea is to make them the same with a
different prefix, as shown:
<item identifier="ITEM-WEL" identifierref="REF-WEL" >
The title of your module, remember, no special characters.
<title>Welcome</title>
This is the minimum required score to pass the module.
<adlcp:masteryscore>80</adlcp:masteryscore>
And then you close the item node.
</item>

9. <item>(cont.)
Make as many of them as needed:
<item identifier="ITEM-CAP1" identifierref="REF-CAP1" >
<title>Chapter 1</title>
<adlcp:masteryscore>80</adlcp:masteryscore>
</item>
<item identifier="ITEM-EVA" identifierref="REF-EVA" >
<title>Evaluation</title>
<adlcp:masteryscore>80</adlcp:masteryscore>
</item>
And close the organization and organizations nodes.
</organization>
</organizations>

10. <resources>,<resource>
This is intended to have a list of all the files needed for the course to
display correctly, first, open the node for all the resources:
<resources>
Then, you have to make a resource node for each of your modules.
<resource identifier="REF-WEL" type="webcontent"
adlcp:scormtype="sco" href="welcome/index.html">
Everything here is very important, let’s dissect it…

11. <resource>
Note that its “identifer” parameter must be exactly the same as the
“identifierref” parameter of its corrresponding <item> node, this is
how they are linked.
<resource identifier="REF-WEL" type="webcontent"
adlcp:scormtype="sco" href="welcome/index.html">
Type must be always “webcontent”, so leave it alone.
The “href” points to the html file that will be launched whenever
the user enters the module.
The scormtype of a resource must be “sco” when said resource is
linked with a launchable item, otherwise, it must be set as “asset”.
The “asset” resources are only lists of required files and they don’t
need the “href” parameter.

12. <resource>(cont.)
Now, onto the resources, they are listed as follows:
<file href="welcome/index.html" />
<file href="welcome/loaderBox.swf" />
<file href="js/APIWrapper.js" />
…
There you go, now you can spend a happy afternoon writing
down every single file in your course.
Pro-tip: don’t.
Although it’s kinda useful, is not really worth the effort, it only
checks to make sure that no files are missing in the package, but
if a file is missing from your project, you will notice, also, the
lack of the list won’t prevent your manifest from passing the
ADL test, so there’s no real need for this list.

13. <resource>(cont.)
Now close that node.
</resource>
And add more as needed, at least one per item,
double check those identifiers.
<resource identifier="REF-CAP1" type="webcontent"
adlcp:scormtype="sco" href="chapter1/index.html">
</resource>
<resource identifier="REF-EVA" type="webcontent"
adlcp:scormtype="sco" href="evaluation/index.html">
</resource>
See? No file list, no cluttered manifest, essential elements only.

14. Finalsteps
The only thing left to do is to close the open nodes:
</resources>
</manifest>
And that’s it, click foward to compare a manifest file generated
by reload editor with the one we just made.

15. Finalsteps

16. Finalsteps

17. Conclusion
All those random generated parameters and the full file list clutter the
manifest and make it hard to read.
Some LMSs will need some parameters, others don’t, for
example, most of them won’t need the “adlcp:masteryscore”
parameter, while others won’t display your course unless you include
the “isvisible” parameter on the item and set to true, you may have to
refer to the LMS documentation to check which parameters are
necessary.
None of those two are needed to pass the ADL test.
When all you need to change to a scorm package is a misspelled module
name, the fastest way to fix it is just to open the manifest and make the
necessary changes, and if your manifest is short and uncluttered, the
change will be a piece of cake.

18. Bye
I hope this slideshow was useful, I hope to have
time to make another soon.
Aurelio Maldonado
aureliomld@gmail.com

19. Links
Notepad++
http://www.notepad-plus-plus.org/
Info on namespaces
http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_namespaces.asp