Survey 123 Template Reports Referencing Unrelated Feature Layers

Question

Hi there

I have developed a relatively simple Quick Capture application for collecting wildlife patrol data :

* patrol routes - includes type (vehicle / by foot) as well as various calculated fields such as duration in hours, distance in km, and a patrol ID which links it to the sightings as well as other routes under the same patrol effort (multi-day patrols for example)
* wildlife sightings - species, number, age/sex, patrol ID.

Note - the patrol ID is a project user input in QC that is set at the beginning of the patrol by the user and contains an input mask to ensure standardisation.

This currently populates a dashboard where you can filter the patrols by date or by patrol id.

What I also want is to be able to write a patrol report using survey123. This would have some extra information such as long notes and which rangers were on the patrol etc. However, I do not want to have to rewrite all the information that was collected re patrol routes and wildlife sightings.

I have two possible solutions but I cannot figure out if either is possible.

1. Am I able to reference the QC layers in the S123 report template and pull in those values directly? If so, how do I do this?

2. Should I use pulldata() to bring all the data collected in QC into the S123 form and then create the report from there? I know this is possible from the report template side as I have created reports referencing related tables before, but I am unsure if you are able to pull in multiple records (ie 40 wildlife sightings or 3 patrol routes) into a repeat field in Survey123.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

TheoHorton · Answer

Thanks Tyler - much appreciated.

I would prefer to use the first solution so its good its possible.

Could you elaborate on how I would put them into the same feature service so this would work?

Do I create a new hosted feature layer and add all the layers to that? Just confused as to how the report would know they are related if it works within S123 where the QC layers are not present?

TylerGraham2 · Answer

1. Yes, you can reference the QC layers in the Survey123 report template using the $layers function. It is very finicky in my experience and poorly documented, but you can do it. It will also accept queries so you can query by your Patrol ID and get records that match without the need for an actual relationship between the layers.  The layers do need to be in the same feature service though.

https://doc.arcgis.com/en/survey123/browser/analyze-results/featurereport-expressions.htm#:~:text=%24layers%5B%22%3Clayername%3E%22%5D%20or

2. I think this would be a struggle to do in Survey123 since you'd have to have a count of all the QC records related to that patrol to specify the number of repeats to create.  It would be easier to use Power Automate or another webhook service to trigger a flow that when the Survey123 record is submitted, copy the appropriate records from the QC layer to the Survey123 layers.