Removing unwanted fields prior to download

Question

Hi there,

When downloading survey responses from the Survey123 web page, some fields are automatically generated such as: ObjectID, GlobalID, CreationDate, Creator, EditDate, Editor, x, and y. I am wondering if there is a way to prevent these fields from being generated. My solution right now is manually deleting the unwanted columns after I download the responses, however this is a tedious step and I feel as though there is a better solution out there prior to exporting the data. I appreciate any help you can offer!

Thank you,

Danni

dannigart · Answer

I ended up creating a macro in excel to remove columns with the headings that I don't want. I'm sure that's similar to what you do in R (maybe subset the columns you want). For anyone interested in a quick fix, I've attached the macro.

cleanup_macro.txt

ZenMasterZeke · Answer

I haven't tried this for the fields you mention, but you can set bind::esrii:fieldtype to null for a field in  general to prevent it from appearing in the feature layer. ID fields would be highly problematic to not include.

Not sure what you'd do if you actually want those fields, just not in a download. I think they can be hidden from display, but don't know if that affects downloading. When I need to manipulate data in a download, I just run it through an R script. Python would work as well; maybe through the api for python?

Richard_Purkis · Answer

Hi @dannigart

I do not believe there is a solution to hide fields or specify fields for downloading. As you may know these are locked fields, generated for each submission and can't be deleted from the feature class.

Hope this helps