topic Re: Ticket numbers and printing Violation forms in ArcGIS Survey123 Questions

Ticket numbers and printing Violation forms

ShaneClarke — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 14:58:55 GMT

I am working on a violation form and there are two capabilities that I think are needed but not yet supported by Survey123:

Auto-incrementing ticket numbers

Printing the violation form in the field to be able to hand the violation ticket to the offender.

Are there any plans and/or suggestions to add these capabilities to Survey123? Or have I missed something? (I did a search and did not really find anything specific to these issues.)

I am aware of this article on ticket numbers:

https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2017/11/25/creating-ticket-numbers-in-survey123-for-arcgis

but I don't think it really solves the problem! In the paper-based system, the inspector/office is given a book of blank forms, with a starting ticket number - and then these ticket numbers are used "offline" with the numbers independent of other books of forms. It would be really useful if Survey123 supported auto-incrementing ticket numbers out-of-the-box. If a form is used in the Survey123 app then this could be considered a potential off-line use and so a starting number would be "issued" with an incrementing suffix which is unique and independent of other ticket numbers.

For the printing, I am aware of the Report (beta) capability, but this does not solve the need of being able to print the ticket/violation in the field. Adding this report capability to the form would be really useful.

I think both of these needs are more applicable to private forms and less applicable to public forms. If this is true, then there would be a small number of field users (officers, inspectors) so a small number of "offline ticket number + suffix" issued.

Any suggestions on meeting these needs? I would guess that these are very common requests.

Re: Ticket numbers and printing Violation forms

JamesTedrick — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 21:12:59 GMT

Hi Shane,

It is possible to replicate the ticket book experience in terms of providing data- that is a pre-allocation of features from a table that already has auto-incrementing values, not an auto-incrementing scenario. The steps involved would be:

1) Create the feature service you wish to store the survey data in. The layer should have a field to allocate by username. If done with an enterprise Geodatabase (recommended), create an auto incrementing trigger to populate the ticket number. Optionally, you can also put a status field in (this will help show only blank tickets).

2) Create a number of blank records. If they have the trigger, they will have the auto-incremented value. (this is the equivalent of printing the ticket book pages)

3) Select a block of records and assign them by populating the username field with who should receive these ticket numbers (that is assigning who gets which ticket book)

4) Create a survey based on this feature service. Enable the Inbox and in the query expression place to filter out the ticket number to only the ones the person is authorized for (if the allocation field is called allocated😞

allocated = ${username}

Using the optional state field (assuming no default value; you would want to supply now in the form design to save a value):

allocated = ${username} and status IS NULL

On the printing of the tickets, what is the equipment being used to print? We would need more details on that and their technical capabilities before looking into bringing an enhancement around this. We also see the possibility of integrating the print template functionality with web hooks to make document generation available after submission.

Re: Ticket numbers and printing Violation forms

ShaneClarke — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 13:52:48 GMT

Thanks, James.

It would be useful if there was a simpler, more automated process for auto-incrementing ticket numbers.

For the printing, I do not know what equipment is used. But I do know that workflows such as a parking violation are forms based, they require a sequential ticket number, and the ticket needs to be printed and placed on the vehicle. Adding support for printing on mobile devices would open up a whole new set of potential uses for Survey123.