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Survey123 - Is there a way to disable the recording of a 0,0 geolocation/geopoint?

StevenSGIS

According to this FAQ...

"Why are some of my survey results appearing off the west coast of Africa?

If your survey does not display a map question, a location is still given to every survey. If a device does not report its location, the default location stored is 0,0, which is located off the west coast of Africa. If you do include a map question in your survey, you can define a default that is more suitable for your survey."

Is there a way to disable this?

I feel it's also important to mention that I am having people record geopoints in other areas of the survey (through repeats), but the first page doesn't have a geopoint question and is still recording (0,0)

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abureaux

No. Esri products are location based, even if you don't need location. As a result, you will always get a location.

MobiusSnake

It sounds like you have a schema that look like this with repeats:

Screenshot 2025-03-06 051457.png

I usually define my schema in a File GDB first, publish that File GDB as a hosted feature service (with multiple layers & tables within it), then use Survey123 Connect to publish my form so it attaches to the existing service. This is done using the Settings worksheet of the XLSX, using submission_url and form_id.

If you take this approach, you can create this schema instead:

Your top-level data will post to the table, and you won't get any points stored, but the geopoints within your repeats will behave normally.

dougbrowning

Will you lose a lot of the 123 website stuff if you do this though? Plus so many things get limited with tables in Esri land.

MobiusSnake

Good question, I rarely use the S123 website, for analytics/reporting I typically use dashboards and Python toolboxes + openpyxl to create custom XLSX reports.

StevenSGIS

I'll have to look into this as a potential solution.

Thank you.

StevenSGIS

I see.

Now my question is, how have people dealt with the (0,0) geopoint "feature?"

Would love to hear how other people have managed - especially when creating a webmap from the data collected.

MobiusSnake

I believe it will require an ArcGIS Pro Standard license since it involves setting up relationship classes, I don't think there's a straightforward way to do that using a Basic license.

An alternative solution you might want to consider would be to generate a polygon from all of the repeat points after the form has been submitted. For that, you want to do something like this:

Keep the "parent" dataset as a layer, but create it so it has a polygon geometry type.
Do not submit a polygon in your form, don't have a polygon question in your form. When your form is submitted, this should result in a null geometry.
Use an ArcGIS Online Notebook to run some Python code that compiles all of the repeat points, gets their min/max coordinates, creates a rectangle, and applies that rectangle to your parent feature's geometry, making it no longer null. Put the notebook on a schedule to run every hour or so.

I've taken this approach using Survey123 forms in the past so that clicking on the parent feature in a dashboard list will zoom to the extent of all child points.

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