1K, 5K,10K ... pushing the limit on External Choices in Survey123

Question

Ever wondered how many external choices can you have before Survey123 maybe chokes on you? 
Well I am here to tell you that I have been consistently able to publish surveys with anywhere between 70K-120K rows/records in the External choices. Now before you start calling me names or brand me an outcast, I am myself not particularly proud of the fact that we had to do it but I had a unique situation where it had to be done and it does work with occasional failure. The survey app works fine too after the initial download (which can take a while - I've seen 15-45 seconds survey load time for 70K+ rows).

This is not something I will proudly promote but doing this is definitely possible if someone needs to do it in a pinch. I thought it was important to share this not-too-exciting achievement 
.

Survey123 for ArcGIS‌

Anonymous User · Answer

Doug, can external choices be used with surveys that are shared with the public?  I am building a survey which selects state-> zip within state -> organization name.  With a limited set of data, it works.  However, when I load it with 33K zipcodes and 51K organization names, it won't publish.

Thoughts?

dougbrowning · Answer

My lists are around 5,000.  Using external_choices is key.

One item that can get you is relevant.  I have a form what loads this 5,000 item list 12 times per repeat!  On Android it takes 2-4 seconds to load a repeat.  iOS it is instant.  What breaks is if I try to hide all 12 of these fields behind a relevant iOS will crash the app.  Android will start randomly losing field calcs.  This is esp true the more apps that are open on the tablet.  So in the end I had to unhide 4 of the fields to get it to stop crashing.

The new 3.5 64 bit Android version does seem to make all of this better (both speed and memory management).  The bummer for us is the rugged Samsung Active 2s we bought are still running 32 bit Android even though it is a 64 bit chip.

This all became a bigger issue when I tried to use repeat_count.  I set it to 50 it seems to preload all 50 x 12 lists each = crash.  Had to take the repeat_count back out.

Hope this helps.

map viewer.jpg

FrancescoGiovinazzo · Answer

Hello Hamid Yunus‌

we are struggling with an external_choices of 24k rows really slowing down everything to the point of being unusable, how did you use 70k rows without killing the app?

Thank you

Regards

Francesco