How to create a two-part survey or link two surveys in Survey 123 Connect

Question

Hi,

I'm attempting to create a survey for Service Calls for a medium-sized municipal water utility. My goal is to create a survey that has two parts: The first will be a report taken by office personnel when customers call in to report an issue with our infrastructure, and the second part is for use by our staff in the field to respond to the service call and collect data related to affected utilities or repairs performed.

I've been attempting to set up this two part structure in Survey 123 Connect by sorting the questions into groups for initial report (office use) and field response (field use). Office users open the survey from the desktop app, in which i've set the group containing questions for field staff as "read only." When this survey is submitted, I would like my field users to be able to then open the submitted survey, see the office group's details as "read-only" and then have edit access to the field response group. When viewed from management in the back office, they could see the entire life cycle of the service order, from the initial call-in, to the field response, and whether or not the service call has been effectively addressed.

This is the first survey I've ever made so I'm a little lost. The "office group" functions as expected, but I don't understand how to get our field staff to be notified when a new service call has been issued. I'm fumbling around with setting inbox filters but it's not working the way I would expect. When I do open that survey in the mobile, I'm seeing the same form that office personnel submit from their desktop app.

Is there a way I can configure the mobile view of a survey so that different users can view and interact with different sections of the survey?

My workaround has been to add the feature layer from the survey to a map in Field Maps, and then configure a smart form in FM Designer from that layer that is configured to have the office group as read-only, and the field group to be editable.

I know there's a better way to get this result without having this workaround, but for the life of me I can't figure it out. What am I missing?

Thanks,

Caitlin

RobertAnderson3 · Answer

It is possible to create 2 different surveys that reference the same feature layer and creating the form to display only the questions you need, or have them be read-only in one survey, and editable in the other. Since you have the one survey created already, when you go to create a new survey, on the lefthand side there is the option to Create a new survey from Feature Services in your Organization. Point to the layer from the first survey, and it will create a new form using the schema of that layer.

You can also edit the submission_url of a survey in the XLSX when working in Survey123 Connect on the Settings tab.

I have used this set up to have users enter their data, and then the supervisors sign off using their form that exposes their approval questions.

I think this would be the best way to create exactly what you're looking for based on how I read your post.

To notify them, that depends how blatant you want it to be I suppose. The Inbox filter could work if you add like a 'Status' field that defaults to new when the office group creates it. Or if you want it to send an email or push notification you could set up a webhook using Power Automate or Make.

I think I like the idea of integrating Field Maps with this project though, whether you have the office group create the point there using the forms, or you could even use the Survey123 layer in Field Maps. Have the office group submit a survey, the layer shows in Field Maps so it shows there's a new point, the field group can either use a form in Field Maps to capture data, or using the URL scheme in the pop up to open Survey123 to capture data. A 'Status' field is probably a good one to have here as well to filter them off the map as they are completed.

DavidSolari · Answer

Supporting multiple trips to the same survey record is a common workflow in my org. We point our survey forms to feature services that use registered EGDB data so we can use attribute rules with a state field to advance the form along as certain key fields are edited. If you don't have access to that, some things you can try are:

* Using the "deviceid" field type, this should have a valid value on mobile and not on the web. Make sure you bind the field type to "null" so it doesn't get into the actual data.
* You can also try adding your objectid or globalid field directly -- again, bind this to "null". Brand new forms should not have the values populated while editing existing forms will.

wcozzens · Answer

The Field Maps maps route might be the way to go, IMO. Rather than use the FM designer, you could configure the pop-up to open Survey123 from Field Maps. This way, you won't have to configure the survey to be read-only for certain users.

Otherwise, Survey123 can be configured to display a URL that opens a survey from another survey. Basically, field worker opens the previously submitted office survey from the inbox. There are a lot of different ways to open as "read-only" (for example, you can check to see if a survey was opened from the inbox). This same logic can apply to the URL - only show the URL when the survey is opened in this read-only mode (for field worker use only).

In both cases, you can pull data from the "read-only" office survey into the field worker survey.

Hope this helps!