Refresh Surveys

RonKnepper

How does a user go about refreshing a survey already downloaded, if the survey format/questions were updated after the initial download?  I have been deleting and the downloading again but the user would loose their copy of surveys sent.  Is there another way?

IsmaelChivite

While authoring your surveys you will probably go through quite a few iterations. This will involve publishing a survey over and over again.  New questions in your form, new options in your choices and updates to existing questions may need schema changes in the Feature Service.  Every time the schema changes you will need to delete your survey and publish it again. We added some details about all of this in our public repo.

In the Survey123 app all you need to do to update a survey is to go into the Download Surveys section and download the survey again.

In some cases updating surveys in the middle of a data collection effort can cause problems. For example, say a user in the field has been collecting data for a few days. Lets assume the user has been working disconnected from the network and has kept all her work in the mobile device. Before the user has chance to submit her work, you go and change the survey removing some questions and adding others. Now the user has a survey in her device that is out of sync. She submits the collected data but the schemas don't match... the chances of losing all her work are high.

Updating a survey that has been already downloaded by people is a big deal.  Just like removing and adding fields into a feature class when people have already created map documents on top of it.

We may be able to make the Survey123 app smarter about this type of changes, but at the moment you will need to be careful about keeping things in sync.   In cases where you just have to update the survey and change the schema, you may want to consider publishing a new version of the survey (v2), understanding that this will create two separate feature services.