topic Re: XLS form screentips for the wrong column in ArcGIS Survey123 Questions

XLS form screentips for the wrong column

EmilyBuck — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 19:31:01 GMT

I am working on troubleshooting a survey someone else set up for my organization. One of the things I have noticed is that the screentips that pop up while in the XLS spreadsheet do not always match the column headers. The basics (type, name, label, hint) columns match along with some of the others, but many do not match and it is not a consistent offset (e.g. they haven't gotten consistently displaced to the right or left).

Is this indicative of a larger problem or should this have no impact on function? I tried googling it and looking around on the forum, have not found anyone experiencing something similar.

The problem I am trying to fix relates to column names in the database of submissions on the Esri site (I believe this is called the hosted feature layer?). In the xls spreadsheet, the alias column (header bind:esri:fieldAlias) gives the screentip for bind::esri:fieldLength and only accepts numbers which are being used to limit field sizes for some questions. Those numbers appear as aliases in the database which is making things difficult on the back end.

Thank you for any insight!

Re: XLS form screentips for the wrong column

ZacharySutherby — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 20:05:51 GMT

Hello @EmilyBuck,

The XLSX data validation doesn't have an impact on the function of Survey123. They are only there to help with your form authoring experience. If the XLSForm template is a little older the data validation is pretty easy to get jumbled up either through inserting new columns or copying and pasting data into the XLSForm.

The easiest way to clean up the XLSForm is to run the Update XLSForm template tool available in Connect. This will copy your survey design into the latest XLSForm template.

Re: XLS form screentips for the wrong column

EmilyBuck — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 16:37:02 GMT

Thank you very much! I will try that.