Surveys Stuck on sending

Crew1CarnivoreMonitoring

Hello,

I am having an issue with a recent survey I published not sending off the tablets we are using. I works just fine when I submit off the web app, but when I try to submit off the tablets it gets stuck on this loading screen (no error appears but it also never sends):

I have tried troubleshooting this with many suggestions in other threads on this site but nothing seems to work. I made sure there was a feature layer first, updated the sharing to make sure everyone was able to submit and edit forms, shrunk the size of photo attachments, deleted and redownloaded the survey forms form the cloud, etc. I have the latest version of the survey123 app on the tablets. 

 

The surveys have a hierarchy where if you answer certain question one way others appear. This is only giving issues on one of the paths and not the other. Again, there's no error that appears and in survey 123 connect it says that my data values are valid. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. 

 

Thanks

 

 

Anonymous User

Hi @Crew1CarnivoreMonitoring,

I have had a look at your XLSForm, and found several issues, which help explain why you are unable to send surveys successfully from the field app when all questions are answered.

The main issue is that you have two questions with the same name (duplicate values in the name column), both are called "photos". One is an "integer" question, the other in an "image" question. This causes binary data from the image question to try and be sent to the integer question with same name, causing an error as the data type and length will not fit in that type of database field and will get truncated. You need to rename one of these fields and ensure there are no duplicates in this column.

The second problem is that for the "bait_distance" question, you are using a integer field type, but you have set an inputMask which has a decimal format (9.9). This will cause the values after the decimal to be truncated, as you can not submit decimal values to a integer field type. You have also tried to set a fieldLength for the integer field, this is also not supported, as an integer field in a database can not have a fieldLength.

Some other minor issues I found are as follows:

- The template you are using is old, and the data validation and formatting rules are not applied to all cells in the sheet, this would have prevented the above duplicate values in name column. You can get the latest 3.12 standard and advanced template from Connect.

- There is an extra choice list "PSUFIA" in the choices sheet that has 1000+ plus values but it is not being used in the survey sheet. This will slow down the performance of the survey as it is loading, converting and storing in xml a large number of choices that are not being used. For large choice lists we recommend moving those lists to the external_choices sheet or to an external CSV file which can be referenced using a select one from file.

- The choice list "PSU" contains duplicate values such as 10+ entries of "000". While this may not seem to cause any issues with XLSForm validation, it may cause issues with calculations and other functions in Survey123 if you are trying to set or calculate based on a selected number from that list, as it wouldn't know the difference between these same choices in the list and select the first one by default. It is best practice to ensure there are no duplicate values in the name column of choice list also.

- The choice list_name for " image_video_size" has a space at the start, suggest to remove this extra space to avoid unexpected issues. Also need to update it in survey sheet where referenced.

- There are special characters in use in some of your choice list names, such as / and : which are not supported in the name column. I would suggest to remove these and only use letter and numbers and underscore, to avoid unexpected issues. Refer to documentation here: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/survey123/desktop/create-surveys/xlsformessentials.htm

Once you fix up these issues and republish (especially the first two mentioned above) the survey will work as expected and you can submit surveys successfully.

Regards,

Phil.