topic Re: Random List - XLS Advanced Form in ArcGIS Survey123 Questions

Random List - XLS Advanced Form

CraigMcIntyre1 — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 13:43:12 GMT

Hello,

I am somewhat new to Surey123 and I'm beginning to create a new survey using the XLS advanced form.

In a nut shell I am creating a cleaning audit, the user will select which unit they are at then score rooms based on cleanliness.

However I am having trouble with being able to show a random sample of rooms to be checked. I know what rooms are in each unit.

For example:
I enter Unit A, upon selecting Unit A on my survey the next 5 questions should be the rooms that are to be audited. Which should be randomly populated from the master list of rooms. i.e Room G1, Room 3.4, Room 5.6 etc

I'd appreciate any help in regards to this.

Thanks Survey123 for ArcGISsurvey123 app#

Re: Random List - XLS Advanced Form

Anonymous User — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 01:23:27 GMT

Hi Craig,

To better understand your use case, would you be able to share your current survey xls form? In the meantime here are a few initial questions:

Are the room types for each unit type set up as choice lists, or are they set up as different fields?

Are the set of questions for each unit type and/or room type the same?

Are you planning to use repeats for the questions associated to rooms? Or are you just wanting to hide questions based on relevance and the random selection of rooms?

Regards,

Phil.

Re: Random List - XLS Advanced Form

CraigMcIntyre1 — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 14:22:57 GMT

Hi Philip,

I've uploaded the file within the Survey123 community page.

As you'll hopefully see from the file, it is still very much a rough draft. The idea will eventually be that you select a school i.e Arkleston

Then the questions about scoring each room would be a random choice from the last list of rooms within Arkleston.

The questions will be the same for each unit, however the room types will be different. i.e Arkleston may have rooms called Room0.2, Room 3.4, Room 2.4

However other units may have rooms titled differently.

Hope this is of help!
Thanks

Re: Random List - XLS Advanced Form

Anonymous User — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 02:03:30 GMT

Hi Craig, I don't see the attached file. You can add it to this post using the Advanced Editor and attach file.

Re: Random List - XLS Advanced Form

Anonymous User — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 02:05:44 GMT

And just to try and understand further, do you want the questions to be random or the selection of the choice list in the questions to be random?

Re: Random List - XLS Advanced Form

CraigMcIntyre1 — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 08:02:47 GMT

The choice list of rooms per each unit is to be random.

Each unit will be asked the same question which will essentially be "How clean is this room?" - But the room the audit takes place in must be random.

I've now attached the file within this post.

Thanks

Re: Random List - XLS Advanced Form

Anonymous User — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 06:16:43 GMT

Hi Craig,

Thanks for the copy of your xls form. There is currently no "easy" way in Survey123 to randomize the selection of values from a choice list using text strings and populating other fields based on this random selection. However it is possible to randomly select a number between a range, as you have done in your xls form. We do have a feature enhancement logged for indexed repeats which may assist in using repeats in your survey to randomly select the values (rooms) used in the next repeat record, however there is currently no timeline on implementation of this feature.

I notice you do not have a room choice list for all the rooms in your xls form yet? Do you have that list and could you populate each room name with a number as the name, the label as the room name and then add a new column called school and populate which which schools they belong to, to help filter the relevant list of rooms based on school selection from previous question. You then need to add a new field called Room Name to each of your Room Audit set of questions, and repeat it 5 times. If you then apply numbers to each it may be possible to use a hidden filed with random calculation or null esri field types (to be released in version 2.4) to do the random number selection, then based on that number returned, select the number from the choice list from the school it applies to. You may need to include some if statements on each room question though to ensure the same room is not selected twice or more.

Hope that helps.

Regards,

Phil.

Re: Random List - XLS Advanced Form

TimothyKing2 — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 21:13:01 GMT

I have a somewhat similar question, wherein I have a choice list of 133 safety topics that I would like to show a random one each time the survey is taken. It is more of a reminder to talk about a safety topic before beginning work. It looks like this may now be available in 2.4 and I will have to look at the null esri field. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks,

Re: Random List - XLS Advanced Form

MarikaVertzonis — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 23:58:20 GMT

I did some exploration and although what Id like to be able to suggest is the ability to set a default value for a select_one question, something like this:

I found this didn't work .

We will explore the behavior of defaults and calculations some more, but in the meantime I was able to succeed with pulldata(). In the following example I moved the the random calculation into a calculate question, and instead of storing my list of values in the choices tab, I put them in a file called randomactivities.csv in the surveys media folder. This is what the .csv file looks like:

Then back in my survey, in a text question I used pulldata() to return the id from the .csv file that matched the random number generated in the calculate question and displayed the corresponding action:

The result is this:

Re: Random List - XLS Advanced Form

TimothyKing2 — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 19:25:09 GMT

That worked great Marika! Thanks!

One thing, do I need to have the randomchoice text and number show up, I would rather just have the saftety tip show up.

Thanks,

LTK

Re: Random List - XLS Advanced Form

MarikaVertzonis — Tue, 14 Nov 2017 00:12:57 GMT

Definitely not - that's just in the example to give visual confirmation that its working.

Re: Random List - XLS Advanced Form

CraigMcIntyre1 — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 14:17:02 GMT

Hi Marika,

I think your method on how to solve this would work! However, is it possible to take it even a step further. Ideally when I select a school the random 'activity' would only show those for that specific school.

We have 50+ schools, meaning I would need to write 50+ lines in the 'relevant' column, dependent on what school was selected.

Thanks for your suggestions!

Re: Random List - XLS Advanced Form

MarikaVertzonis — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 23:22:20 GMT

Adding the school choice leads you down the path of needing a cascading select ie: choose school and then from a reduced list of activities, choose an activity. If you haven't already tried the cascading select sample, do have a look at it. Saying that, I tried using a choice_filter on the question that does the pulldata from the csv (to limit the list to activities that are relevant to a school that was chosen in a previous question), but it doesn't work - nor is it really designed to. The choice_filter is really about limiting the list in a second select_one question.

So does each school have a different list of random activities? Or can you arrange your information so you use the same list of random activities for each school? I think this would be the best way to do it. Or can you organize groups of lists? eg: schools 1,5,6,7 use list 1 and schools 2,3,4,8,9 use list 2? Then you could use the random choice generator as above, just apply it to different questions.