topic Re: Pulldata not working - Survey123 newbie! in ArcGIS Survey123 Questions

Pulldata not working - Survey123 newbie!

mroberts_troy — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 15:15:16 GMT

Hey everyone! I'm relatively new to using Survey123 and XLSForms, so I'm going to ask a question that's been asked a million times before, I'm sure, but I did a lot of looking around and my understanding of how Survey123 & XLSForms is so un-sophisticated that I was just getting lost. Apologies for being repetative here.

Problem statement: I want to do a multiple level lookup so that when I select "Job", "Phase", and "Team member" that my next drop down has the default value for that person's role on that job and phase, BUT if a user wants to change their role, they can, using a drop down.

My effort so far: I created a CSV file that will have all the jobs and all the phases and all the people (right now it's just a sample set for testing), and then created a column that concatenated those and assigned them each roles. Again, right now this is purely dummy data for testing.

In my XLSForm, I have a drop down for job (general_job), a drop down for phase (general_phases), and a drop down for people (labor_level1). Next, I created a text field that displays a concatenation which combines the displayed labels for each of those things, using the jr:choice-name command:

concat(jr:choice-name(${general_job},'${general_job}'),jr:choice-name(${general_phases},'${general_phases}'),jr:choice-name(${labor_level1},'${labor_level1}'))

Everything so-far, so-good.

My next step was to add a calculation to the dropdown question and ideally it should work. One thing to note is that I'm still going on displayed values rather than the name, because in the CSV I don't want to have to include the funny name of the label.

pulldata('rolespulldata','role','concatlookup', jr:choice-name(${labor_concatlookup},'${labor_concatlookup}'))

However, when I put in the pulldata calculation into the role selection question, I'm not getting any response. Nothing. I even tried copying the calculation into a text field to see if there was some conflict between the possible values in the drop down vs the values in the CSV file, but still nada.

I'm attaching the XLSForm and the CSV to see if you guys have any ideas. Thanks again for your help!

Re: Pulldata not working - Survey123 newbie!

Katie_Clark — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 16:29:18 GMT

First question....is the CSV file stored in the "media" folder of the survey directory?

Re: Pulldata not working - Survey123 newbie!

ZacharySutherby — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 16:42:12 GMT

Hello @mroberts_troy,

Thank you for passing along the sample XLSForm and CSV! I've tested on my end with Connect 3.13.251 and I am seeing the pulldata() function bring in the correct information:

Just to confirm are you using the same version of Survey123 Connect? You can find the version by selecting the little hamburger on the top right (or your profile icon if you're signed in), and the version will be on the bottom right of the pane that pops up.

If you are using the latest version of Connect back in that menu that popped up when you selected the hamburger if you select Settings > click and hold on the title "Survey123 Connect Settings", this will pop up a Beta tab. In the Beta tab there is a toggle for "Itemset tools" if you enable that back in your survey along the bottom ribbon you will see an Itemsets button. Selecting that Itemsets button, on the bottom right you should see Tables/Views, in that box do you see the name of your CSV (rolespulldata) and if so do you see the CSV data in that table?

Re: Pulldata not working - Survey123 newbie!

mroberts_troy — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 20:59:29 GMT

I just put it in that folder on my desktop. Now what? 🙂

Re: Pulldata not working - Survey123 newbie!

mroberts_troy — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 21:09:19 GMT

Okay, so I now have it mostly working. I didn't know the file needed to be in the media folder. My only issue is that even though the looked up value is in the CSV as an exact copy as the lookup from the XLSForm, it's throwing an invalid value error. See this screenshot.

Re: Pulldata not working - Survey123 newbie!

Katie_Clark — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 22:01:10 GMT

Maybe I'm a bit confused, but I'm not able to reproduce the error you're showing. The "select their role" field populates with a string like "Test 18" based on the concatenation from previous fields. Do I need to do something different to try to replicate exactly what you're getting?

There may be something related to labels vs. names here?

Also, you've probably already referenced this, but just in case, this is a fantastic post about pulldata from James Tedrick.

Re: Pulldata not working - Survey123 newbie!

mroberts_troy — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 14:05:56 GMT

Okay, here's the updated files with the actual names instead of Test names. The goal here is that the drop down will be pre-populated with the person's listed role in the CSV, but if the survey user wants to change their role, they can do so. So the role label in the CSV and the label in the drop down menu need to match - which in my example, they do.

Re: Pulldata not working - Survey123 newbie!

Katie_Clark — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 17:42:34 GMT

Ok, so I downloaded the attached version of the Survey and CSV, and set it up on my machine with Survey123 Connect v. 3.12.232. It seems to be working fine for me: when I choose values from the dropdown, the role auto-populates with the text in blue:

If I manually change the role after that, the text changes to black (which implies it should still be a value that the survey will accept).

Do you experience different results when you test the survey in Connect on your machine?

---

Also, unrelated to your initial post but I have some (admittedly unsolicited) feedback for the user-interface of your survey, since you said you were so new to it. I would recommend having the date question have a default value of today() or now(). Just one less "click" for the field worker to have to do! (They could easily still change the date if needed).

Re: Pulldata not working - Survey123 newbie!

mroberts_troy — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 19:25:55 GMT

I'm on the version Survey123 Connect Version 3.13.251 (maybe it's a version issue?) , and am getting red text when I go through the same procedure you listed above. See this screenshot:

Regarding your side note - I might add today as the default value, but the SME I'm working with suggested he wouldn't want people to make the mistake of not picking the right date, so we've avoided a default value there, for now.

Re: Pulldata not working - Survey123 newbie!

Katie_Clark — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 19:49:24 GMT

That is very strange, if you're getting different results running the exact same survey XLS form on the same version of S123 Connect. Maybe try experimenting with removing the jr-choice-name and see if it works?

Another suggestion would just be to try building a brand new survey using the same schema, sometimes that helps to reset things or at least test to see if it behaves differently in a new survey.

Also, totally makes sense about the date field!

Re: Pulldata not working - Survey123 newbie!

mroberts_troy — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 20:18:46 GMT

Starting fresh didn't work. 😞

When you suggest removing the jr-choice-name ... where do you suggest removing that? Wouldn't that load the Name... which isn't in the dropdown?

Re: Pulldata not working - Survey123 newbie!

Katie_Clark — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 21:55:41 GMT

Hmmm, I could be wrong about the jr-choice-name thing. At this point, since I'm not able to replicate the issue, you may want to open a support case with Esri Support so they can screenshare with you and better identify the problem.

Good luck! 🙂