Retrieve data sent to Survey123?

Question

I made a modification to a survey design that inadvertently affected the feature service (as an aside, re-publishing in Connect indicated it would not) - now I have a field of data that only shows null values, despite users having selected responses...  Unfortunately, it appears that all 'sent surveys' have been emptied from devices...  Is there any way to retrieve the raw data uploaded to Survey123?  Thanks for any help!

EdZlonis · Answer

Hi James,

Sorry for my lack of clarity.  I spent some time sleuthing, but I can't definitively determine the sequence of events in this situation so don't want to lead you down a rabbit hole...  I'm no longer confident that it had anything to do with a select_multiple -> select_one.  It could have been a multitude of small changes, as I was trying to preserve the old feature service so I didn't need to manually re-enter data to a new survey and thus don't have a sequential version history to reflect upon.

Thanks,

Ed

JamesTedrick · Answer

If they manually emptied the sent folder, then the submissions are no longer in the database.

On trying to reproduce the issue, the steps were:

1) You created the initial survey with a select_multiple

2) Users downloaded the survey form

3) You then changed the survey to have a select_one

Is this correct?

A couple of points would help clarify:

Did the users submit data before or after step 3?

If after, did the users update their forms before submittal?

If they updated their forms, did the users have surveys completed but not submitted at the time of the update?

EdZlonis · Answer

Thanks so much for your quick response, James.  The surveys were largely submitted by a Samsung Galaxy Note tablet - Android.  Unfortunately, I don't have the device in front of me to copy the .sqlite database.  However, if I am able to get the device and follow the instructions for 'Recover data from a mobile device', will I be able to retrieve the original responses from the user [~20 surveys submitted]?  Despite them having emptied the sent surveys folder?

I believe the change I made to the question was from a select_multiple to select_one.  If I recall correctly, there was some instability as I ran the checker once or twice with slight changes to get the desired outcome - an obvious foolish choice in retrospect!

Ed