Create a new window from CDF, such that it contains a Manipulate. Force this Manipulate work.

Question

I have a notebook with such a button creating code:

    Button["Details",
 CreateDocument[
         Column[{
    Spacer[20],
    TextCell["Some text", "Text", FontSize -> 14],
    Spacer[20],
    Manipulate[
     Plot[Sin[k*x], {x, 0, 2 \[Pi]}], {k, 1, 
      3}]            
                       }],
  WindowSize -> {400, 400}, Magnification -> 1.25, 
  NotebookFileName -> "Details", Evaluatable -> True], 
 ImageSize -> {50, 18}, Background -> Brown, 
 BaseStyle -> {"GenericButton", Bold}]

After this code is evaluated, the button appears. Now I copy-paste this button into some place in one of the Text cells of my notebook. Until this moment everything works quite as expected: upon pressing the button opens a new notebook with a Manipulate-based interactive demonstration. The latter can be manipulated without problems.

Now I would like to transform my whole initial notebook into a CDF document. Again it works, except for the place where the button calls the new window.

The window opens, but there I see a gray rectangle in the place of the interactive demonstration. There is also some explanation, why the interactive demonstration does not work.

The explanation is "self-learning". First it told me that it does not work, since evaluation is disabled. OK, I enabled the evaluation. It started to tell that CDF does not at all play content other than the Wolfram demonstration one.

My question: do you see a workaround, or I came to a principle limitation of the CDF player?

Answer 1

Just to be a little more precise. The free CDF player cannot run dynamic contents created by CreateDocument, but the Player Pro can do that and many other things. Here is a full list of comparison among different player versions: http://www.wolfram.com/player-pro/how-player-pro-compares.html Moreover, when you want to check if something is working into the pro version and not in the free one, you can use the CDF preview from menu File -> CDF Preview -> CDF Player (CDF Pro). This will open a temporary cdf copy of your notebook and show how it behaves. In your example you can see that the Pro version works.

Answer 2

I came across this problem a while back and emailed Wolfram Research about it. The answer came back that the free CDF player cannot display dynamic content in windows created with CreateDocument.