Survey123 form not always opening when called from Field Maps

Question

We are developing an inspection workflow with Field Maps and Survey123. The inspector should navigate to a point in Field Maps, click on a link and fill out a form in Survey123 for the corresponding point.

However, if Survey123 is not running in the background, the link leads to the overview page in Survey123 rather than the form. Once Survey123 runs, the link works correctly: the form opens and some fields are populated. As soon as Survey123 is closed in the task manager of the smartphone, the link leads again to the overview page.

Is this a mistake on my side or a bug? And are there any workarounds? We would like to prevent that a user opens the form manually, because we require that some fields are populated via the link.

I tried two link schemes and both showed this behaviour:
https://survey123.arcgis.app?itemID=b02d5bcef5854331a33f18af1db8013c&field:location_ID={OBJECTID}
arcgis-survey123://?itemID=b02d5bcef5854331a33f18af1db8013c&field:location_ID={OBJECTID}

I'm running Field Maps on a Samsung Galaxy S7 with Android 8.0.0. However, we also observed the same behaviour on other android smartphones.

SvenBuchmann · Answer

I've now also played with several different Android smartphones. On an Android 11, it opens the app informations. On an Android 12 it seems to work.

Is there a setting in the app that I missed?

SvenBuchmann · Answer

Thanks for your response!

I'm using Survey123 connect version 3.15.178 and Field Maps version 22.3.1

The problem also occurs in a minimal example, where I only link to the form via the itemID and don't pass any fields. The form only opens if the app runs already.

Also thanks for the tip with the OBJECTID. I'll try to migrate to a better solution if I get it to run properly.

ChristopherCounsell · Answer

Works fine on my side... What version of Survey123 connect was used to publish the survey and what version of the field app are you using?

Also strongly recommend not using the objectid field for anything. It's a system field that's not always sequential, can change and can't be maintained. If you need a uniqueid there may be better ways of doing it (time, user, etc) or there is always the globalid which is easier to maintain.