topic Re: Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters in ArcGIS Survey123 Questions

Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters

Trippetoe — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:34:18 GMT

Hello.

Is it possible to open a web-based survey to a specific page (like page 2 of 4, or some such) - perhaps from a URL parameter maybe? I saw a list of parameters here, but none of them looked promising. Are there other options for opening the survey to a specific page?

Thank you.

Re: Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters

JanelleGuzman — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 14:38:21 GMT

Can you share the survey? Perhaps I can assist, I just need to see how the link and survey are setup.

Re: Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters

abureaux — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 15:20:25 GMT

Short answer is "No".

Surveys start on Page 1 in both the Web and Field App by default.

Re: Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters

Trippetoe — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 19:16:34 GMT

Hi @JanelleGuzman There is no survey to share yet. We are still at the 'on the drawing board' stage at this time.

Re: Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters

Trippetoe — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 19:18:06 GMT

Hello @abureaux . Thanks for your reply.

By any chance is there a 'Long Answer' that can get to 'Yes'. Or is 'No' both the short and long answer?

Re: Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters

abureaux — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 20:03:20 GMT

The long answer is something like "you could get the API and make a custom app". So reasonably speaking, "no".

Maybe we can think about this another way. If you want to start on Page 3 (for example), do you really need to have pages 1 and 2 even available? If not, I'd consider hiding them with relevant/body::esri:visible. That way your user "starts on page 1", which is actually page 3 since the real pages 1 and 2 are hidden.

Re: Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters

Trippetoe — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 21:56:07 GMT

I think of myself as a somewhat reasonable person, so i'm good with 'no' as the official answer.

Here's a high level description of what we're wanting to do. I'm working with some park planners as they develop multiple options for improving an existing park. The planners want to use Survey123 to get citizen's feedback on various aspects of the multiple plans. And there are lots of 'aspects' to the options. We are imagining a scrolling story map where each 'aspect' of a the design option gets a full text description, graphics, images etc, etc, and then place a survey at the end of that aspect that asks multiple questions to get citizens feedback, rankings, etc. specific to that aspect. And then citizens can scroll down to the next aspect, get descirptions, images, etc and a survey at the end of that section .... and so on. Each 'aspect' would have its own Page in the survey. that's why i was wondering if we could specify what page to open the survey on. We want to keep all the answers in a single survey to support "cross-tab" analyses if possible

Maybe this is starting to drag on too long. Anyway, i'd love hear ideas about how we could pull off something like this.

Thank you for sharing your time and knowledge.

Re: Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters

abureaux — Wed, 01 May 2024 14:31:34 GMT

Ahh. Cool concept.

Given that, there are a few different routes you could take. The easiest and most streamlined (IMO) would be to make your "Parent Survey" and then "Child Surveys" based on it.

Create your parent survey (I.e., a survey with every question you want to ask)
Publish parent survey
In Connect, do "New Survey" > "Feature services" (found under "Organization", on the left) > locate the parent survey you just published and select it > click "Create survey"
Format this survey to be for a specific aspect.
Publish your child survey.
Repeat Steps 3 to 5 for all remaining aspects.
In your storey map, use the child surveys for each aspect. Now, when people add responses, they will all feed into the parent survey.

Now, this will leave you with blank columns. E.g., Someone fills out child survey for aspect 1, then the columns for aspects 2 on-wards will be empty (since, you know, they didn't get data). You should still be able to perform the necessary data operations though. But perhaps this is what you were trying to avoid with the "set start page" question?

Re: Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters

JanelleGuzman — Wed, 01 May 2024 14:48:06 GMT

Perhaps creating a few surveys but maintaining a common field so you can perform a join at the end of the activity. Similar to what @abureaux recommended minus that parent survey. Should the manual join at the end not be feasible, definitely take their suggestion.

Re: Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters

abureaux — Wed, 01 May 2024 14:52:21 GMT

A connector field for a join may not even be necessary. In which case, just making separate surveys for each aspect would also work.

Re: Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters

Trippetoe — Wed, 01 May 2024 15:14:53 GMT

That is a fabulous idea. Thank you for sharing it!

I'm also intrigued by the suggestion from @JanelleGuzman for a common 'connector' across multiple surveys. I could see something like an auto-created guid when a user opens the storymap, or something along those lines, which gets submitted when each 'child' survey is submitted - a sort of session id if you will. But, i've got no good ideas yet on how that might be done. Do you?

Re: Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters

RobertAnderson3 — Wed, 01 May 2024 15:24:58 GMT

The pulldata(@property) has some functions that could be used to link the surveys to the same device/user, you could look at using that to help link them together in a hidden calculation field, like pulldata(@property,'deviceId') for example. More details at the link below:

Prepopulate answers—ArcGIS Survey123 | Documentation

Re: Is it possible to open a survey to a specific page via URL parameters

Trippetoe — Wed, 01 May 2024 15:47:04 GMT

Hey @RobertAnderson3 . That is another cool idea. I didn't know those properties were available.

Since the survey will likely be part of a StoryMap, it seems like we wont have access to deviceId, deviceModel, and OS. And my thinking is that 'userAgent' is specific to the browser, so we could group together all Chrome macOS users' answers (for example), but that would be as fine-grained as we could get with the cross-tabs.

But that's closer to what we are imagining than we were yesterday.