topic Re: Syntax to search substring for selected(question,value) in ArcGIS Survey123 Questions

Syntax to search substring for selected(question,value)

MilesMcCoy-Sulentic — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 22:29:25 GMT

I'm hoping to create a pop-up note when a selected response is not within a list of set responses. I believe it is possible using the selected(question,value) formula in the relevant column and some sort of substring search, but am not sure what the syntax might be.

The survey is for plant species, and I would like to pop up a warning if the user records a plant that is not within it's known range (list of counties). My thought is that I can have the user select the county they are in, and then use that response to search for a match in the range list. I think the structure might be something like: selected(${County}) %in% Range, but I don't know how to go about a substring search in Survey123 syntax.

type	name	label
text	example	Example
select_one county	County	County
begin repeat	plantList	Species
select_one species	species	Select Species:
note		outside known county
end repeat

Survey Tab

example of species data from choices tab

list_name	name	label	Range
species	Pseudelymus_saxicola	Pseudelymus saxicola	Beaver, Box Elder, Cache, Carbon, Daggett, Davis, Duchesne, Emery
species	Abies_sp.	Abies sp.	Cache

species

Achnatherum_parishii

Achnatherum parishii

Carbon, Dag

Re: Syntax to search substring for selected(question,value)

JohnathanHasthorpe — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 02:25:54 GMT

Hi Miles

Have you considered using cascading selects?

This way you could use the county as a choice filter on the species list, and the user would only be able to select a species that exists within the county they selected.

This would work if you were not to use ranges, but instead break them up into counties. You would need to have a record in the choice list for each species in each individual county:

list_name

name

label

County

species

Pseudelymus_saxicola

Pseudelymus saxicola

Beaver

Box Elder

How many species and ranges are we talking about here - is this possible?

There is a sample for cascading selects in Connect and the help is here: Cascading and external selects—Survey123 for ArcGIS | ArcGIS

Thanks

John

Re: Syntax to search substring for selected(question,value)

MilesMcCoy-Sulentic — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 15:32:04 GMT

Jonathan -

Thanks for the help! I was hoping to have an entire state's worth of species in the list (~4,000 species), and thought that having each county list would be to large, but I've limited the species list to a limited number of counties within the work area, and the cascading select to get a county species list is a great approach.

Re: Syntax to search substring for selected(question,value)

MilesMcCoy-Sulentic — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 16:30:16 GMT

Another approach I've come up with is to avoid the county species lists, and load one list of the entire state species list into the external choices and link it to a question in the choices tab to enable autocomplete search for species. To supply additional relevant info that I want to see but don't need to edit (i.e- which counties it's known from, it's nativity, and state sensitivity) I've put this info into a .csv in the media folder and used a combination of calculate question and pulldata, and note questions to pop up a species nativity, sensitivity, and known locations after selecting it. It is nice to have the entire list as there are some species that are known to occur in the state, but do not have any county records listed in the USDA plants list (yet).