Submission Errors and Checking Versions

PeterTimmers

I wish there was some way to validate a survey on the mobile device before collection. 

We have had people who have downloaded older versions of a survey and haven't bothered to update the project and go off and collect then tell us that they can't submit.

I wish that if there was an internet connection for a device that it would check the submission url and schema before opening a project.

And while we're on this topic, is there any to extract old, out-of-date data from projects that won't submit? 😕

JamesTedrick

Hi Peter,

Thanks for pointing out the need to check the survey compatibility.  Implementing this well is a bit difficult as we can't guarantee the the ability to validate that the survey still matches *before* collection,- collection may happen offline or the network environment may end up being slow enough to significantly hold up collection.  If we check after collection but before publishing, it's still the same situation as you are experiencing, perhaps with a better error message; there's no way to automatically convert between an old form and a new form (we could make assumptions about field names, etc, but that would be a bit risky).

As for reading the data from old forms, we can provide a bit more help.  The fist step is to extract the survey (an attachments); refer to Troubleshoot—Survey123 for ArcGIS | ArcGIS for guidance.  I've posted a script at GitHub - tedrick/ReadS123DB: Convert the survey data stored in the Survey123 Field App into a set of CSV files  that will read the database that stores all submissions on the device and export them as a series of CSV files.  From there, you can process the information like any other dataset.