Survey123 submission: administrator to have push option

JamesBotterill4

When surveys are completed offline in Survey123, it would be nice for the administrator publishing the survey, to have an option for the survey to submit/upload from the outbox automatically when connectivity/internet is reached.

This would benefit the timeliness of the data collected... for example around end of month reporting metrics

I believe Collector for ArcGIS has this push option under each web map users have under "My maps"

ScottPrindle · ‎03-23-2018

Hello James,

Thank you for submitting this idea!

Just to clarify, you would like the ability to configure this automatic submission of surveys at the survey level, rather than in the Survey123 app itself? Could you share any workflows or projects where the timeliness of survey submissions is required? This additional context can help us better understand your needs in this space.

The "Push Only" option in Collector is a little different than the functionality you've described. This setting allows the user to only push their edits up to the service. When enabled, a sync in Collector will not request new/updated features to be downloaded from the service. In low bandwidth areas, this can be useful since you would only be uploading, and wouldn't have to worry about downloading a large file with every sync.

Thanks,

Scott

JamesBotterill4 · ‎03-23-2018

Hi Scott,

Yes what we would really like to control the submission of surveys that are held in the outbox, after the user has completed surveys offline... when they next hit an internet connection and I've set the survey form to "push".... then it pushes the outbox contents up to AGOL / Enterprise. It could do this across all surveys at the app level, but informing the user they have data in the outbox... or automatically in each survey should the admin have set it this way. This avoids users forgetting to submit surveys in the outbox, which happens to us a lot... and results in more timely data for analytics etc.

One survey we do is a Vehicle Prestart, walking around a LV checking everything is in order. Users complete these daily, but it's often weeks before we see their data... and often in between times they have been in cellular data range, but haven't had time to go to the survey to push the outbox content up. I'm looking for a function to do this as a service.

Cheers,

James

AnnekaFrance · ‎04-13-2018

Hi,

We are also in need of a feature like this that allows us to "push" any surveys sitting in the outbox when an internet connection is made. Ideally, this would be a background process that does not require the app itself to be open. We were previously using SurveyCTO | Offline mobile data collection, which has a very useful automatic upload feature for all completed forms that can be turned on or off. However, switching to Survey123 has not been as smooth a transition as we would have liked and it has caused some serious delays in our analysis and reporting timelines.

We have been collecting data in Tanzania where data networks are poor, so we often collect surveys offline using 80 tablets at a time. It is extremely time consuming for staff to come back to the office and open the app to manually send data from each tablet one by one, especially with the intermittent and slow WiFi. We often have strict reporting deadlines to meet for our donors and since switching to Survey123 our data is rarely submitted on time and records are often missing as some tablets are missed or fail to upload on the first attempt.

Monitoring, evaluation and learning are vital to the work we do and we need a seamless data system to ensure that we are successfully delivering our projects. A "push" feature will definitely solve the issues we are having and help us to streamline the data collection and reporting process.

Thanks,

Anneka