topic Re: Capture duration (time) of the survey in ArcGIS Survey123 Questions

Capture duration (time) of the survey

PamelaLandy — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 16:46:01 GMT

Hi everyone,

How can I take note of the time it takes to carry out a survey ( in survey123 ) from the beginning to the end (50 questions) and to be able to save that period of time (minutes) in the database? . Thanks

Re: Capture duration (time) of the survey

ABishop — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 17:07:06 GMT

I don't see where Survey123 will allow this type of tracking by default. As a suggestion, you may want to add a field to your data to have the user enter the time started and then at the end of the survey, the time stopped. Then you can use those two times to do your own analysis on the back end.

Re: Capture duration (time) of the survey

jcarlson — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 17:10:46 GMT

There are question types start and end available. They are hidden questions that simply log the date and time the survey was started and ended, respectively.

To populate a field with the duration, you can simply use the calculation ${end_time_field} - ${start_time_field}. This will return the number of milliseconds between the two, which you can then divide by 60,000 to get the minutes.

EDIT: I should mention this requires the use of Survey123 Connect.

Re: Capture duration (time) of the survey

DougBrowning — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 16:39:53 GMT

One issue we had with this is if you edit the form the times are really long. Not sure if once() would help.

Re: Capture duration (time) of the survey

ChuckShaw1 — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:17:13 GMT

This appears to be just what I'm looking for. However, when I tried this solution, it doesn't appear to give me the times in milliseconds. The first time I filled out the survey it gave me dates with times as the output. The calculate field that I created to subtract the end time from the start time spit out a date of 1970-01-01. Each time I filled out the survey it gave me this same value.

I tried changing the field type to integer on these fields but when I did that it simply spit out 2023 for the start and end dates and the calculate field spit out 1970.

Is there a setting in there somewhere that I need to change so that it looks at the times in milliseconds rather than a date?

Re: Capture duration (time) of the survey

DougBrowning — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 15:15:03 GMT

I did it this way.

Have a time field called StartedForm with a calc of once(now())

Add a Note field Minutes Elapsed with a calc of round(int(now() - ${StartedForm}) div (1000*60),1)

This was back from 2020 and we do not use it anymore so not positive.