We had "official" training on our DekoCast about a year ago, but thanks to one thing after another we're just now getting around to setting it up for its intended purpose.  

One thing I'm trying to build is an action to allow our MCO's to run crawls--Amber Alerts, school closings, etc.--and I want it to be as ultra simple as possible.  Specifically, I'm looking for a way of building an action that, when run, will pull in the appropriate data from a source on our intranet, slide a background and logo up on the screen, then trigger a crawl using that data.  Once the crawl is finished, the background and logo slide back down off the screen.  The easy part was building the actions to slide the graphics on- and off-screen.  The problem I'm trying to solve is how to tell another action that a crawl is finished, without asking the MCO to drop the graphic back off the screen when the crawl is over.  In other words, I'd like to make it so that the MCO can click one button in DekoCast Central and be done with it.

Does a crawl object give any sort of signal to the environment once the text is finished?  Is there a good parameter I could monitor for that? 

 Answering my own question, in case anyone in the future is looking for a similar thing...

In the help file, there are directions for adding graphics to a crawl object--the idea being to be able to insert a station logo or other graphic element between lines in a crawl (i.e. CNN puts their logo between each story that appears on their ticker).  Basically, you add a cel animation as a child of the text object.  Then you add a rule to the text object which inserts the cel animation at the end of line 1. 

Once you've added the rule, you can have the rule trigger another action using the Advanced pane at the bottom of the Rules window--when the cel animation moves on or off screen, it triggers the second action to drop the crawl off-screen.  Because I don't want to see the cel animation, I moved it off the bottom of the screen.  The cel animation moving off the left edge of the screen (even though it's below the bottom of the screen and not visible) is enough to trigger the next action.

My guess (hope?) is that there's a better way of doing this that I just haven't come across, but since this works for me, I thought I'd share it...