Using a Survey 123 form in Collector

[RonaldVanderpool]

Greetings!

I know this question has been asked on several occasions but the search is exhausting as I am obviously not typing in exactly what I should to find the correct response/guidance.

I have feature layers; i.e. manholes, etc. that I would like the Collector users to be able to just click on the link in a field an take them directly to the form for inspections/maintenance. The same field would be visible in the AGOL web mapping application.

I thought about just creating the field in Pro and then have the field calculated to just be the URL.

Is there a better way using Arcade? Python? Just as a heads up, not much of a scripting guru as of yet.

Also do it in Pro or just publish and do it in AGOL?

Thanks in advance for steering to the right answer.

🙂

[JoeCatanzarita1]

Ronald Vanderpool,

Hello and good afternoon! After some digging, I came across this blog: Understanding Survey123's custom URL Scheme. I saw this blog posted in this GeoNet question: Open Survey123 from Collector.

Now both of these posts are a few years old, so there might be a different way to incorporate a Survey into Collector, but the Understanding Survey123's custom URL Scheme blog should be a good start for you.

Feel free to write back with any additional questions!

Cheers,

Joe

[RonaldVanderpool]

Thanks Joe!

I did come across the "Open Survey 123 from Collector" but not the other one. I will do some research and see what transpires. As with most ESRI functions there are multiple ways to accomplish a task or workflow. Just need to get a handle on what is easiest for me to remember. I'll update as I move forward. 

[Katie_Clark]

Hi Ronald,

To add to what Joe said, I believe using the custom URL scheme is the best way to do this workflow right now. I used this help page to figure out how to do it for my surveys: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/survey123/reference/integratewithotherapps.htm 

You've got the right idea - create a new field called "Survey Link" (or whatever you want. Just make sure obviously it's a string type and has a long character limit!) and use field calculator to make the value equal to the URL. Will you want all features to have the same link? If so, that's pretty simple. It is possible to customize the link to autopopulate parts of the survey, but that gets a little more complicated.

As for which platform to do it in, you can do it either in Pro/ArcMap or ArcGIS Online. However, my personal recommendation is to do it in Desktop first if possible, since I've had better luck with the field calculator there! I like that you can use Python scripting to calculate fields with Desktop - I don't think AGOL has that functionality yet.

Let us know how if you need more help!

[RonaldVanderpool]

Thanks Katherine!

Good information. This will be a great help.

I do desire to have all features have the same link as my Form is specific to the feature type. I configured popups to have the link in Pro but lost all of my other fields/attributes in the popup so that was not what I wanted. The web map app will also need the link in each feature popup along with the auto-populating of the Asset_ID field just to make sure the field personnel do not use the wrong asset identifier.

Wish I had more time to play with all of the fun ESRI stuff but have to have results in a timely manner, thus,....... I bug the experts!! 🙂

[Katie_Clark]

Weird, I'm not sure why adding a field to your layer in Pro would cause you to lose all of your other fields? Maybe I'm not understanding correctly?

In order to populate a field in the survey (i.e. Asset_ID) from information from the feature in Collector, you'll need to use a custom attribute display.

Example (put this in the "link" portion of the custom attribute display):

arcgis-survey123://?itemID=36ff9e8c13e042a58cfce4ad87f55d19&field:surname={name}

You can read more about it in the link I referenced before. 

[RonaldVanderpool]

In Pro, right-clicked on feature, selected configure popups, added the link to a new field. Just reviewed my workflow and it appears I deleted the existing fields from the popup before I added the text field for the link. I reset everything and now it works like it should. Is it still Monday??? 🙂

Still need to set the configuration to populate the field in Survey.