trying to see if Survey 123 would be viable for my workplace

Question

Hello All,

Sorry if this is long but I am having a hard time getting answers through Tech demos from the Esri crew and need to know a bit more before I try to convince my employers to switch over to Survey 123.

for a summary of what we do: We inspect construction sites once a week (300ish sites between all inspectors) and send out pdfs to clients with the summaries and actionable items. There are just a few things I'm not sure whether or not they are possible with survey 123.

First- We need to have semi-dynamic surveys and would prefer to not have to create new surveys for each site. By dynamic I mean that some sites will have 3 photos of a location, specifying 1-3 BMPs that we inspected, while another site might have only 1, or maybe 12. I think we could manage this through repeats but I'm not sure. It would be nice to have these split up by zone (i.e. north boundary, midsite, south boundary, etc...) so I think maybe a repeat for each zone allowing each site to have variable listings within those zones? Can photos be used in repeats?

Second- It would be preferred to be able to use or copy over the previous weeks report and just replace some photos and change comments on the next weeks inspections. Therefore if we wrote a long description of an item and it is unchanged, we can leave the comment and replace the photo. Not sure if this is possible or not.

Third- Would it be possible to take the date from one report submission, and populating it into a "previous inspection date" field on the next report?

Finally- we would like to attach a markup of a design to one of the last pages, are you able to include that in the report generating process, or would we simply have to insert that page to the generated PDF?

TylerGraham2 · Answer

You can 100% use photos in repeats, you can even set up the repeat to essentially create a photo log. We use this for archaeology monitoring, and the repeat field has the photo and a text field for the photo description. I call them both in the report template so in the report you get the phot along with the description of it all together.

A repeat in Survey123 is a 1 to Many related table in the database structure, so you can fill out the repeat 1 time or 50 times. You can also control the number of repeats that can be created for a record, so if you have an inspector that takes 200 photos during an inspection when they only need 10 you can limit how many they can submit.  If you have cases where there are no photos taken, you would use smart form logic and have a question in the main survey like Photos Taken? Yes/No.  If yes, show the photo repeat, if no hide the photo repeats.

You can setup a field in the repeat to set a zone that the photo was taken in.  But you might also think about grabbing a location of the photo. Construction workers sometimes like to play dumb if the BMP fix is hard. Survey123 only allows one geometry question to actually go into a database table, but a repeat is a separate table from the main survey, so you could also include a point feature for the photo location and show them exactly where it is.

TylerGraham2 · Answer

PDFs can't be displayed in the report. There is a bit of a work around for that though.  We use Microsoft Power Automate to automatically generate and email a report from one of our surveys when it is completed, and in the power automate flow you can extract the pdf file from the feature service and include it as an attachment in the email.

NickFenn · Answer

Thank you very much, I greatly appreciate it. Have a good day!