topic Re: Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers. in ArcGIS Survey123 Questions

Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers.

JonathanPendleton — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 19:03:18 GMT

When working with larger, more complex surveys. I find that there is often a real need to see what you had previously entered for a specific question. The "Set answers as favorite" option attempts to address this but falls short in a two main areas. First, the favorite answers option saves/pastes 100% of the answers from your favorited survey. This is not ideal with large surveys with many questions, because it can be difficult to remember which answers need to change and which need to stay the same. Second, every time you want the favorite answers to change you need to reset them and save them again. So in order to bring answers from survey to survey dynamically, you have to reset them, save them, and paste them every time. This eats up a lot of time, is cumbersome, and is just one more thing to think about when in the field surveying.

So what's the solution? I think the solution is persistent answers. By persistent answers, I mean the ability to either in the .XLS survey form, or in the survey123 app it's self, flag specific questions in order to make their answers persist to the very next survey. For example, if my survey has a question named "question #1" I want to be able to flag that question so every time a new survey gets opened, the form or app looks at the previous data that has already been collected for that question, and returns the most recent answer for question #1 automatically. So if I decide to leave the question with an answer of "123", it would automatically fill out the corresponding question on the next survey with the same answer of "123". But if I decide to change the answer from "123" to "ABC" it would see that "ABC" was the most recent answer and return that answer for question #1 when the next survey is opened. This would address both problems I have with the "Set answers as favorite" option.

I think this feature would be very useful and could potentially save quite a bit of time. I would love to see it implemented. From a programming standpoint (given my limited knowledge of programming) it doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to implement either. It would be a nice quality of life improvement for those of use who work with larger survey forms.

Let me know your thoughts! Also, I tried to explain it as clearly as possible but if anyone needs further clarification let me know and I will do my best to further explain.

Re: Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers.

PeterTimmers — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 03:07:05 GMT

I agree too. We're asking our users to enter the street address, and as they progress down the street it would be good to remember the street name from the last entry.

Re: Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers.

HamidYunus — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 07:51:07 GMT

Great idea.. similar to the cookies concept for browsers to expedite surveys completion.

Re: Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers.

PeterTimmers — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:17:15 GMT

I notice persistent answers exist in the web version of Survey123.

Re: Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers.

DougBrowning — Tue, 07 Feb 2017 22:06:29 GMT

What we do is open the last (or any) survey from the sent folder, change what we want then send. It counts as a brand new survey.

Re: Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers.

RalphBradt1 — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 15:46:32 GMT

I had the same problem with all the answers being saved rather just than the few I wanted. I found the suggestion to start a survey, populate it with only the answers I want to repeat, set as favorite answers, then save the survey as a draft, to be a bit awkward, but it worked. The problem that remained is that because the geopoint is automatically collected, it is also saved as a favorite answer. It's overwritten in a new survey, but if there is no satellite fix during the new survey, the favorite geopoint is assigned to the new survey. Unless you have that favorite geopoint written down or memorized to compare with the new survey, you can't tell if a new point has been collected.

Re: Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers.

JonathanPendleton — Mon, 22 May 2017 18:11:49 GMT

It's been about six months sense I posted this. Does anyone know if there is a solution like this yet? I really need it. A few of your questions are long numbers and it would be so helpful to see what we entered in the previous survey (only on specific questions).

Re: Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers.

JonathanPendleton — Mon, 22 May 2017 18:23:20 GMT

This doesn't help my problem really. The problem with that solution is, when you open up the old survey to author a new one from it, you can very easily forget to change obscure data points when your working with large surveys sense all data points are filled in already. You can easily forget which ones need to be changed or miss one by mistake. For example, our XLS form for our survey is about 460 rows long. It's massive. It takes 35 seconds just to open it up in Survey123 Connect. With a survey that big you can easily forget a question buried somewhere. This is why I need it only to bring up the most recent entries for specific questions that a difficult to answer without knowing what was entered previously.

Re: Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers.

Anonymous User — Mon, 22 May 2017 21:16:51 GMT

Jonathan is there anyway for you to create a custom URL within a note field that will pass the answers of questions from the previous survey into the new survey? We have accomplished this but it can be difficult to make sure you have the URL structured correctly and the only way that I have found to do this is through the concatenate command.

Essentially, I added a note field that will be used as a hyperlink open up the second survey 123 form and pass values of questions from the first form into questions on the second form. However I'm on sure how many values you need to pass we are currently passing 10 values between two different forms. You will also need to use the ESRI custom column to declare it as a string field. Also, to ensure the newly concatenated URL string is stored correctly within the note field, you need to make the field extremely large. In our case I made the string field 800 characters.

mike

Re: Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers.

JonathanPendleton — Tue, 23 May 2017 15:19:47 GMT

Mike thanks for the reply! Is there anywhere I could read more about this process? How does workflow go when this is achieved. Does it always carry over answers from the most recent survey or just from a specific survey? When you open up a new survey do you just click the hyperlink and the right answers from the previous survey fill in? With the string field being so large, did it add a significant amount of load time to the survey?

Re: Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers.

Anonymous User — Tue, 23 May 2017 16:19:20 GMT

Jonathan,

I had worked my way through the following two reads and then did some experimenting in order to devise a method I described above.

https://community.esri.com/groups/survey123/blog/2016/07/30/understanding-survey123s-custom-url-scheme

Integrate with other apps—Survey123 for ArcGIS | ArcGIS

In terms of the workflow, I am not entirely sure how the hyperlink is created? Meaning, I'm unsure if the hyperlink is being dynamically created as you answer the questions or if the hyperlink is created after you click on the Hyperlink Text?

For sake of conversation let's use the Form 1 and Form 2 as our forms that will contain data (Form 1) and pass data to (Form 2). I have my field crews download both Form 1 and Form 2 onto the device they are using; mostly because they will not have access to a data connection. Then I am having our field crews fill out Form 1 as they need to complete their work. Next when a special condition is met, I have them go back into the correct instance of Form 1; which contains the information that will be passed over to Form 2, and have them scroll to the bottom of the form. I have a Note question that states would you like to open Form 2? The hyperlink text that I used says "click here to open Form 2".

My Form 2 opens up and and the data from Form 1 is then passed into Form 2 based on the custom URL schema for integration with other apps. I figured out that you can use a custom URL hyperlink within a note field that uses a concatenate command to pull data from previously answered questions and pass them into other forms.

The custom URL is saved within the database that houses the rest of the form data. WE have not seen any change in the loading of the form, which makes me think that the custom URL is not created until the Hyperlinked Note test has been activated.

Here is my previous posting about using this to create a custom email link that utilizes this same functionality of passing data from one app to another, but you could use it in the same manner with some tweaking to pass between Forms.

https://community.esri.com/thread/194609-not-your-standard-note-question-email-link

Cheers,

Mike

Re: Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers.

RebeccaFuda — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 16:41:37 GMT

I agree with Jonathan that a "persistent answers" option would be extremely useful!

Re: Survey123 Feature Request: Persistent Answers.

NicolasRoger — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 15:16:58 GMT

I would also like to see a betther way to save favorite answers.