Limitation on Building Forms for FieldMaps

[KansasDASC]

Developing some ideas for upcoming projects and would like to use ArcGIS Field Maps with SmartForms for a field inspection and reporting application. This is a typical analog to digital conversion project with the goal of improving existing paper-filled workflows by using Esri tech. There are several inspection reports where some are 40-50 fields in multiple groups and some forms that have 100+ questions. I'm wondering if FieldMaps/Forms is ideal for something like this? Will 100+ questions on a single form be viable or is SmartForms meant for smaller projects?

If not SmartForms for FieldMaps, what else would be better?

[RyanUthoff]

It's probably going to depend on the complexity of the forms you need to create. If you need to create a lot of advanced logic with calculations and stuff like that, you will probably be better off using Survey123. Otherwise, for more basic functionality, Field Maps might be an acceptable use case. Although, 100+ questions might be a lot for it to support. Survey123 shouldn't have any issues with 100+ questions though.

[KansasDASC]

Thanks, @RyanUthoff. The forms won't be that complex; some questions will be dependent on others (i.e. Yes, No, Other). Other option leading to open text entry. There might be some Arcade expressions mixed in, but nothing SmartForms can't handle. The unknown is the handling of 100+ form fields. Probably not suitable if it's deployed on a phone, but a tablet would work.

If SmartForms can't handle this, does S123 handle field map editing/collection?

[RyanUthoff]

Yeah, I'm not 100% sure on how many questions SmartForms can handle. I've never tried building a SmartForm that large before.

As far as S123, while I don't think it's impossible, it can't easily directly update existing data. Typically, when you create a S123 form, it will create a brand new feature service for data collection. Then you would have to ETL that data to update your existing data in your production environment. With this workflow, you can create S123 launch links in the pop-up in Field Maps which will automatically open the S123 form and transfer over and pre-populate values in the S123 form (such as an ID, etc.).

I believe there is a way to edit existing data in S123, although it will require more configuration. You can configure S123 to use an existing feature service, although it has to meet certain requirements and can be finnicky to work with. This YouTube video has an explanation of how that works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGTPIzTtbSk

[KansasDASC]

Thanks, again. I agree with your assessment. It's possible to do all that with S123, but all that extra configuration and unforeseen limitations was probably remedied with FieldMaps/SmartForms. We'll have to do more thinking on this. I have reached out to Esri to see if they have a formal response on the technical limits of SmartForms. Thanks, for the video, will be watching that.